bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How Information Spread Among the Gentry, 1550-1640
Authors: Levy F. J.
Published: February 2004

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.
The Left-Wing Whigs: Whitbread, The Mountain and Reform, 1809–1815
Authors: Rapp Dean
Published: February 2004

In the decade after 1807, the Whig Opposition was divided between the conservatives and the progressives, the former consisting of the Grenvillites and most Foxite-Whigs, particularly their leaders, while many of the latter associated together in the Mountain. This was led by Samuel Whitbread until his death in 1815. It was distinguished from the rest of the Opposition primarily by its independent, aggressively activist support for economical and parliamentary reform and its willingness to associate on these issues with the followers of Sir Francis Burdett and the metropolitan radicals. The Opposition as a whole, and more recently the Grenvillites, have been carefully examined as part of the ongoing study of political groups in this era, but as yet there is no systematic analysis of the Mountain. This paper identifies twenty-one Mountaineers and marshalls the evidence for the nature of their activities together. It also analyzes the sources and nature of their reformist ideology, their independence, their tactics as a pressure group and their relationship to the Whigs and the radicals.

I

Twelve Mountaineers were by birth aristocrats and gentry. The Mountain's independent character was in part shaped by country gentlemen like Thomas William Coke and Charles Callis Western. Although committed to Whiggism and the Whig party, such men also inherited in some respects the eighteenth-century country party mentality which believed that the executive was corrupt and prided itself on acting independently as a check upon its excesses. Young Lord Folkestone, even more independent, was committed to Whiggism but not at all to the Whig party for he thought of himself as an independent, virtuous aristocrat guarding against and exposing government corruption.
The “Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill” Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family Purity in Victorian England
Authors: Anderson Nancy F.
Published: February 2004

In 1835 the English Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst introduced into the House of Lords a bill to correct an ambiguity in the law concerning marriages within prohibited degrees. The existing law, based on the 1533 Henrican statute fixing the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, specified that marriages within prohibited degrees could be annulled at any time within the lifetime of both spouses by the Ecclesiastical Court. Lord Lyndhurst argued that the uncertain status of such “voidable marriages” created an inconvenience and hardship for the married persons and especially for their children, who could during their parents' lifetime be declared illegitimate. His specific motive was to guarantee the legitimacy and inheritance of the son of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had married his deceased wife's half-sister, a relationship within the prohibited degrees. Lyndhurst proposed that parliament pass a bill to limit to two years the time within which marriages could be annulled.

The consensus in parliament was that the ambiguity of “voidable marriages” should be eliminated, and they readily passed a revised form of Lord Lyndhurst's bill, declaring that all marriages within the prohibited degrees of affinity contracted before August 31, 1835 were immediately and absolutely valid. Yet, even as they eased restrictions on existing marriages, they tightened the law for the future by adding a clause which made marriages of both affinity and consanguinity contracted after that date absolutely void.

In the parliamentary debate on the bill, there was some opposition from those who argued that marriages within certain degrees of affinity, in particular a man and his deceased wife's sister, should be permitted.
Public School Elites in Early-Victorian England: The Boys at Harrow and Merchant Taylors' Schools from 1825 to 1850
Authors: Allen Edward A.
Published: February 2004

Historians agree that the public schools played a central role in the creation of Victorian society and that in particular they were seminal in the construction of that “mid-Victorian compromise” which made the mid-century an era of “balance,” “equipoise,” and accommodation. There is further agreement that the cadre of boys produced by the newly reformed public schools became that mid-Victorian governing and social elite which was at once larger, more broadly based, more professional and, to many, more talented than the one which preceded it. The importance of the public schools in this regard was, as Asa Briggs affirms, twofold. They assimilated the “representatives of old families with the sons of the new middle classes,” thereby creating the “social amalgam” which, in Briggs' view, “cemented old and new ruling groups which had previously remained apart.” Secondly, the singular expression of that amalgamation was an elite type, the “Christian Gentleman”—the result of an “education in character” administered under the influence of Dr. Arnold. Arnold was able to do this because he “reconciled the serious classes” (that is, the commercial middle class) “to the public schools,” sharing as he did “their faith in progress, goodness, and their own vocation.” At first, the schools “attracted primarily the sons of the nobility, gentry and professional classes.” Later, it was the “sons of the leaders of industry” who were, like earlier generations of boys, amalgamated with “the sons of men of different traditions” in a broadened “conception of a gentleman.”
Florence Nightingale and J.S. Mill Debate Women's Rights
Authors: Pugh Evelyn L.
Published: February 2004

In Florence Nightingale's correspondence a series of letters to and from J.S. Mill treat a different subject than her usual correspondence with government officials, health and sanitation reformers, and hospital administrators in many parts of the world. Although it was never her intention when she initiated the exchange of letters, she and Mill quickly became involved in a controversy concerning the role of women.

Interwoven with some religious and philosophical matters, the Nightingale-Mill correspondence which falls into two periods, 1860 and 1867, is essentially a debate on women's rights. One debate concerns terminology and hinges on the entire validity of the question of publicity for the women's movement, then in its infancy, as well as the opening of the medical profession to women. The other focuses on differing perceptions of the role of women in political action. The exchange never became public during the lifetime of the participants, emerging with little notice only in the twentieth century with the complete publication of their correspondence in the journalHospitalsin 1936.

J.S. Mill's views on women's rights were public knowledge in his own day and have continued to be studied exhaustively. Florence Nightingale has been studied as the remarkable woman responsible for opening a respected profession for women. The point is often made that she refused to sign the women's petition Mill presented to the House of Commons in 1866 and would not at first become a member of the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
The Council of Whitby: A Study in Early Anglo-Saxon Politics
Authors: Abels Richard
Published: February 2004

The scene is familiar to most students of English history. In 664 A.D. the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and his son Alhfrith met with their clergy at Whitby to resolve (in Bede's words) “a great and active controversy about the keeping of Easter.” Oswiu, who presided over the council, listened patiently to a long and often bitter debate between the Irish and Roman advocates. On the surface, it was an unequal contest, for the traditions of Iona were upheld by the king's own bishop, Colman, while those of Rome were championed by a young abbot, Wilfrid, a protege of Alhfrith. But once again David slew Goliath. Oswiu, fearing for the welfare of his soul, pronounced in favor of the Apostle Peter, the “hostiarius … qui claues tenere probatur,” thus turning his back on his own childhood teachings. “When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognized to be better.”

Bede portrayed the Council of Whitby as the decisive confrontation in his native Northumbria between the rival ecclesiastical traditions of Rome and Iona. For him, the Roman triumph, the climax of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, signified that the Northumbrian church would no longer be guided by “a handful of people in the remotest of islands,” but would rejoin the “catholic and apostolic" Church of Christ. Oswiu's dramatic conversion at Whitby was thus a crucial step in the growth of Christian unity in the British Isles.
Spouses, Siblings and Surnames: Reconstructing Families From Medieval Village Court Rolls
Authors: Bennett Judith M.
Published: February 2004

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.
The Royal College of Physicians of London and Its Support of the Parliamentary Cause in the English Civil War
Authors: Birken William Joseph
Published: February 2004

In the mélange of conflicting theories on the origins of the English Civil War, a number of English social groups have received scrupulous attention. Storms have brewed over the gentry, the aristocracy, and more recently, “the middle sort of people” in town and countryside. Even the rural peasantry, traditionally neglected by historians, have not been overlooked in the most recent debates. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the English professional classes although studies of the clerical and legal professions have been forthcoming of late. Perhaps worst served of all in the ongoing war of scholars has been the English medical profession. The recent historiography on English physicians and their relationship to the Civil War can be briefly summarized.

The little work that has been done on professional physicians revolves almost exclusively around the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1964, in a distinguished history of the college, Sir George Clark suggested that the fellowship probably leaned to the royalist cause, but out of political expediency accommodated itself to the reality of parliament's power in the City of London. Referring to the events of 1642 and 1643, Clark wrote:

The College as a body could not have done anything for the King if it had wished to. In London this authority was ended and if the College was to perform its duties there it had no choice but to recognize the de facto rulers..
State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?
Authors: Bartrip P.W.J.
Published: February 2004

The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age oflaissez-faire” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.

The termlaissez-fairehas been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.

The most influential case for an “age oflaissez-faire” was presented by Dicey inLaw and Public Opinion. In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.
Dangerous to Themselves and Others: the Victorian Debate over the Prevention of Wrongful Confinement
Authors: McCandless Peter
Published: February 2004

Wilkie Collins's Victorian novel The Woman in White contains a scene in which the hero unknowingly aids the woman of the title, Anne Catherick, to escape from an asylum. When he learns that she was an escaped patient, he reflects on his action: “what had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?” The question was one which, less directly, confronted Victorian society as a whole. The nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of an asylum system designed “mercifully to control” the insane, a development of which many Englishmen felt proud. Yet this pride was often accompanied by an endemic, nagging fear that persons were being improperly confined in asylums. Occasionally, the exposure of some apparently egregious case of wrongful confinement raised these fears to epidemic proportions and produced what the Victorians called “lunacy panics.” These outbursts of public rage symptomized the tensions within a society determined to ban the mad from its midst, yet uncertain of the boundaries of madness, skeptical of the abilities of those it had chosen to draw those boundaries, and undecided as to the actual purposes of confinement. Indeed, the Victorians never clearly established what they meant by “wrongful” confinement. At times they seemed to mean the confinement of the sane; at other times they seemed to include those who were insane but not manifestly dangerous.
Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman And the Liberal Imperialists
Authors: Bernstein George L.
Published: February 2004

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was elected leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons in January 1899, the party already was divided over the issue of imperialism. By the end of the year, the Boer War had accentuated that division. During the next six years, this disagreement over imperial policy was converted into a struggle between CB (as he was known to his contemporaries) and the Liberal Imperialists for control of the Liberal party. In the course of that struggle, Lord Rosebery, the leader of the Liberal Imperialists, repudiated CB's leadership; the Liberal Imperialists established their own organization, the Liberal League; and finally, the three most prominent Liberal Imperialists in the House of Commons—H.H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and R.B. Haldane—tried to force CB to become a prime minister in the House of Lords before they would serve under him.

Despite the obvious talents of the men involved, the Liberal Imperialists failed in their efforts either to capture the Liberal party or to dislodge CB from his position as leader. Because CB's leadership in opposition has seemed weak, there has been a tendency, even on the part of his sympathetic biographers, to attribute his success in beating back the Liberal Imperialist challenge to pluck and luck rather than to political skill. CB was plucky in his willingness to stick with the thankless task of leading a divided party whose most prominent members—Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, and John Morley—insisted on acting as alternatives to CB both as definers of policy and as focuses for the loyalty of Liberal M.P.s. CB was lucky in that the actions of the Unionist government of 1902-1905 reunited the fractured Liberals.
Warren Fisher and the Transformation of the British Treasury, 1919–1939
Authors: Greenaway John R.
Published: February 2004

It has long been recognized that British central administration rarely undergoes radical upheaval. Major changes tend to occur in a cumulative or incremental manner, rather than being imposed suddenly as part of a politically-inspired program of reform. Even when the tempo of change in Whitehall has been at its quickest, for example in the two world wars, the dominant pattern has been for ad hoc adaptation of existing practices or for uncoordinated improvisations. All this is in character for a country whose political system is determined less by institutional frameworks or legal codifications than by ever subtly changing codes of practice or conventions. As a result, however, it is not unknown for significant changes in the workings of Whitehall to go largely unnoticed by contemporaries. It is argued here that one such development was the transformation in the inter-war period of the Treasury and of the higher civil service which was presided over by Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 1919 to 1939.

The extent and significance of these changes has tended to be masked even for later historians by the more obvious upheavals in both the work and organization of departments during each of the world wars. However, the changes wrought by Fisher and his associates had repercussions far beyond the confines of the Treasury itself. Five interrelated developments can be traced during this period.
Property Investment by Canterbury Cathedral Priory 1250–1400
Authors: Mate Mavis
Published: February 2004

Henry de Eastry, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury from 1285 to 1331, has long been regarded as primarily responsible for the priory's financial health. On his accession, the monastery was deeply in debt. Eastry, by his reorganization of the administration and his far-seeing policies of adding to the convent's property and exploiting these resources to the fullest, was able to raise the priory “from a state of insolvency to what was probably the highest level of productivity in its history.” One reason that Eastry enjoys such an excellent reputation is that he left behind him several extremely significant records, including a register of his writs and a memorandum book in which he set forth his achievements with elaborate detail. Yet some of his predecessors and successors followed policies that were very similar to those pursued by Eastry. It is time to re-examine Eastry's role in the priory's history and to determine whether his contribution was indeed as outstanding as has been hitherto assumed.

The area that most lends itself to this investigation is that of property investment. R.A.L. Smith, in his pioneering study of the convent's administration only touched on this aspect. He stated that during Eastry's priorate the monks “made astute investments in land,” but gave few examples. Moreover he never tackled the problem of how the priory's activities were affected by the statute of mortmain of 1279, which, in theory at least, severely restricted property accumulation on the part of ecclesiastical institutions. Nor did he consider the question of whether the tremendous fall in population after 1348 hindered or facilitated the acquisition of lands and rents. A detailed analysis, over a fairly long period, of the policies pursued by the priory with regard to investment in land, rent, and building, can not only point out the contribution made by Eastry, but also shed light on the more general questions of the economic impact of the Black Death and the effectiveness of the statute of mortmain.
“Who Can't Pray With Me, Can't Love Me”: Toleration and the Early Jacobean Recusancy Policy
Authors: LaRocca John J.
Published: February 2004

On March 24, 1603, the day on which Elizabeth was both dead and alive, James VI not only inherited the English throne, but also the Queen's Catholic subjects and the policy which she and her council had devised to contain and render neutral a potentially rebellious minority. Unlike religious minorities on the continent, however, the recusants were not an armed force waiting to defend their freedom to worship. Rather, they were a minority considered dangerous because of their potential as rebels. In dealing with that potentially rebellious group James's policy differed from continental solutions to the problem of religious minorities. His policy was based on his firm belief that the human conscience was inviolable and that “force never helped in religious matters and that gallant men should not be forced to die as martyrs.” These beliefs led James to attempt to introduce religious toleration in England. Previous treatments of the first three years of James's reign and previous analyses of the Oath of Allegiance of 1606 have failed to see that James was using the oath as the basis of religious toleration. The oath solved both the problem of religious authority and the problem of fidelity to a monarch with whom one differed in religion, because the oath recognized the King's God-given authority as a monarch while not denying that the Bishop of Rome did have a spiritual authority over the Englishmen who belonged to his church. If Catholic subjects accepted that oath, James would grant them a limited form of toleration.
Clarendon and the Caroline Myth of Peace
Authors: Anselment Raymond A.
Published: February 2004

The origins of the Civil War are apparent from the outset of theHistory of the Rebellion:“he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of the time,” Clarendon contends, “will find all this bulk of misery to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us, from the same natural causes and means which have usually attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification, and castigation of Heaven.” The relationship between prosperity and calamity is, of course, commonplace in classical as well as seventeenth-century chronicles of civil conflict, but both the sections of theHistorywritten in 1646 and those added some twenty years later insist that “the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation” (I, 84). Although he modifies his praise of this peaceful era inThe Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon,claiming that“Englandenjoyed the greatest Measure of Felicity that it [and not, as he earlier said, any nation] had ever known,” this view of Caroline prosperity remains extreme. Clarendon likens the years of Charles's personal rule to a golden age. Without specifically invoking the classical tradition of the halcyon calm or the return of Astraea, his recollection of the 1630s gives central importance and new immediacy to a well-established Caroline myth of peace.

Modern historians have generally found much amiss in the decade of Charles's personal rule, and they have naturally questioned Clarendon's characterization of unrivalled happiness. Only B. H. G. Wormald's seminal study of Clarendon accepts the notion of “unparalleled prosperity,” which, it argues, “is an indisputable fact so far at least as the gentry were concerned.”
Religion and Reform at the Polls: Nonconformity in Cambridge Politics, 1774–1784
Authors: Bradley James E.
Published: February 2004

Most studies of eighteenth-century Nonconformity have concentrated upon the Dissenters' political ideology, and their contribution to the emergence of liberal thought is now established. Such well-known reformers as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and less prominent ones like William Smith and Robert Robinson of Cambridge, all illustrate the importance of Nonconformity to the Commonwealthman tradition. Two related issues, however, call for further investigation: the influence of the leaders' progressive ideology upon the laity's political behavior and the Dissenters' relation to Whig party politics and reform. The most widely accepted view of the political impact of Nonconformity was advanced by W. E. H. Lecky and G. M. Trevelyan. Both historians assumed that the laity's behavior was an accurate reflection of the beliefs of the elite, and they proceeded to make large claims for the importance of Nonconformity to the English “party system.” In the Romanes Lecture of 1926, Trevelyan advanced the thesis in its classic form: “from the Restoration to the latter years of the Nineteenth Century, the continuity of the two parties in English politics was very largely due to the two-party system in religious observance, popularly known as Church and Chapel.” Within three years of Trevelyan's writing, the Whig interpretation of party was demolished by Lewis Namier, and with the dismantling of the notion of a two-party system, there seemed little reason to pursue the more refined issue of religion and party. Only recently has the topic been taken up again, and this research suggests that there may have been a significant connection between Nonconformity and party politics at both the national and the local level.
British Parliamentary Party Alignment and the Indian Issue, 1857–1858
Authors: Hawkins Angus
Published: February 2004

During the unusually hot summer of 1857 English society was shocked and outraged by reports of atrocity and mass murder. News of the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny reached London on June 26, 1857 and, during the succeeding months, tales of massacre and torture followed. Polite Victorian society was incensed. This article examines Parliament's response to this crisis. It reveals that there exists no simple relation between events occurring outside Westminster and the response within. Parliamentary perception passes through the medium of public rhetoric, established policy, party circumstance, and the private concerns of prominent personalities. This creates less a refractive distortion of events than a new aspect to their understanding. Issues such as India acquired significance within a continuing context of parliamentary circumstance long preceding the immediate cause of substantive concern. This article, then, is not about India as such, but about the particular form the Indian question assumed within Westminster. This is a significant concern in itself because of the insight preoccupation with India provided into the tensions, antagonisms, aspirations, and hopes shaping party alignment during the mid-nineteenth century.

A further aspect of this translation of external circumstance into parliamentary perception is that an issue only became the occasion of crisis when it was portrayed as critical. Once again, there existed no simple relation between external events and the response within Westminster. Popular moral outrage over native atrocities became a political crisis over administrative reform. This particular parliamentary response was neither necessary nor inevitable. The recognition of crisis and the particular crisis perceived are themselves historical events that require explanation.
Play Up! Play Up! And Play the Game! Sport at the Late Victorian Girls' Public School
Authors: McCrone Kathleen E.
Published: February 2004

Although in recent years Victorianists have eagerly cultivated the fields of sport and women's history, they have produced surprisingly little relating the two areas. Historians of women have virtually ignored the physical dimension of the struggle for female emancipation, while historians of sport have reflected sport's traditional male orientation by neglecting the distaff side. As W. J. Baker noted recently in theJournal of Sport History, “the history of British women in sports … stands high on the agenda of work to be done.”

What limited material there is on women's sport history as such has tended to be produced by physical educators or amateurs like former players and journalists whose methodology can only be described as narrative-descriptive. A broad historical perspective permitting an exploration of the relationship between women's sport and social change is noticeable by its absence. Interpretation and analysis if they exist at all are usually limited to commonplace and uncritical observations about sport mirroring social attitudes to women and providing them with new opportunities for recreation and physical exercise. Such studies should not be denigrated, for when precious little has been known even of the facts of women's involvement in sport their revelation is certainly an important stage in the journey of discovery. However, if a truly meaningful and comprehensive picture is to be developed interpretative accounts are needed, which deal with such topics as power and control, motivation, the nature of participation, female sport's ambiguities and socially disruptive potential, its emancipating and restricting characteristics, and the interaction between feminism and female athleticism.
“Cashing In”: The Parties and the National Government, August 1931—September 1932
Authors: Wrench David J.
Published: February 2004

The traditional approach to the political crisis of 1931 and the events that followed it is to seek to establish responsibility, or guilt, for the fall of the second Labour Government and the formation of its National successor. Few doubt the conventional wisdom that after August 1931 the Conservatives were “cashing in,” completing the imprisonment of MacDonald, securing a massive parliamentary majority, enacting protectionist legislation, and finally causing the resignation of the free traders in September 1932. This orthodoxy has been reinforced in a recent study by John Fair, in which a new “culprit” has been found in Neville Chamberlain. If the evidence of his “culpability” in bringing down the Labour Government is unconvincing, it is buttressed by the assumption that the Conservatives gained most from the crisis, by controlling the new government and enacting conservative measures.

The study of these events cannot advance beyond the discovery of culprits while it remains confined to the study of individual roles. What is needed, and what this article seeks to supply, is an analysis which takes into account the whole political context, the condition and prospects of all the parties concerned at the time when the crisis broke upon them. It is necessary to separate clearly the expectations of the parties in August from the quite unforseen rewards that they reaped in the October election. The partisan bitterness which has plagued the study of the crisis has largely resulted from a failure to achieve such a separation.
The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney
Authors: Worden Blair
Published: February 2004

Centenary commemorations can have their ironies. If we look from 1783 to 1883 to 1983, we see a rise in the status of centenaries, and a decline in the status of Algernon Sidney. This is, I think, the first time that a centenary of the Whig martyrdoms has been publicly observed. But it is not the first time one has been noticed. Soon after the first centenary, a play in London by the Irish clergyman Thomas Stratford about Sidney's fellow martyr Lord Russell, apparently a theatrical disaster of some magnitude, remarked on the passage of “one hundred years since godlike Russell bled” and portrayed Sidney as “Brutus of England,” whose “pulse beats with rapture at the sound of freedom.” Eleven years later, in the north German town of Kiel, the eighteen-year-old Barthold Georg Niebuhr—who was to exert so strong an influence on Ranke—celebrated as a “consecrated day” the “anniversary of Algernon Sidney's death.” (He got the day wrong, but that was an error common enough during the process of sanctification that raised Sidney's virtues above the chronological detail in which they had found reflection.) Niebuhr noted gloomily that, although Sidney's name and his “brilliant talents” were widely known, “perhaps there are not fifty persons in all Germany who have taken the pains to inform themselves accurately about his life and fortunes.” I doubt if there are fifty today.
William, Lord Russell: The Making of a Martyr, 1683–1983
Authors: Schwoerer Lois G.
Published: February 2004

On July 21, 1683, William, Lord Russell, the former leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons, was executed in Lincoln's Inn Fields for high treason. The week before a jury had convicted him of conspiring with other Whig leaders in schemes that have become known as the Rye House Plot to raise rebellion by capturing King Charles II's guards and, thereby, in law, to kill the king. But Russell is not known in history as a traitor or even as a Whig conspirator. Rather he is remembered as a Whig martyr, as a victim of late-Stuart tyranny, a man who suffered death in the cause of the liberties and rights of Englishmen and the true Protestant religion. To explain how the Whig conspirator became the Whig martyr and has remained so from 1683 to the present is my central purpose in this essay. I will show that the carefully constructed image of Russell as martyr drew inspiration from familial and political considerations and that it has influenced our understanding not only of Russell but also of late-Stuart politics and political ideas.

It is self-evident, I think, that a martyr is made—and made only by the interaction of three factors. First, an individual must die or endure suffering with great courage on behalf of some cause or principle. Although this is true of all martyrs, there seem to be no personality traits common to them. A common pattern of psychological behavior does seem apparent, however, among sixteenth-century English Protestant martyrs awaiting execution. Curiously, given the quantity of twentieth-century martyrs, modern psychiatrists have not studied martyrs systematically, but one has ventured the suggestion that a physiological condition—a “highly developed cortical base” in the brain that increases a person's capacity for empathy and decreases his regard for egocentric needs—may account for an individual's self-sacrifice. This is a tantalizing thought, but, obviously, at this remove in time it is impossible to discover anything about the structure of Lord Russell's brain. But evidence does show that he was a heedless person, prone to act without calculating the consequences.
A Historiographical Survey: Anglo-Saxon Kings and Kingship since World War II
Authors: Rosenthal Joel T.
Published: February 2004

Three points by way of introduction. The first concerns the definition and delineation of the subject. Because kingship is but one ill-defined kingdom in the shifting intellectual heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, I have been rigorous almost to the point of ruthlessness about excluding topics just at or beyond our boundaries. Not only scholarly contributions and scholars but also whole fields and subfields of historical inquiry have been precluded from consideration: the list of neglected, ignored, and relegated topics is very long indeed. Then I come to the question of whether this survey has any hopes for originality. What dreams I might have harbored for a new clarion call were quickly dashed when, early in my preparation of this article, I came on Eric John's comment that “more books have been written about Anglo-Saxon kingship than about Anglo-Saxon kings.” Once I got my torch alight I quickly realized how many footsteps already covered the path. And last, this article in some sense is offered as a memorial to Dorothy Whitelock, our greatest modern Anglo-Saxonist after Stenton. Though she did not live to complete her study of Alfred the Great, we have been assured that it will soon see the light of day. The frequency with which Whitelock's name appears in the bibliography gives some idea of her versatility and her relentless intellectual curiosity. To the study of kingship alone her first postwar contribution appears in the 1954 listings; her last—the reedition of her magisterialEnglish Historical Documents, volume 1—in 1979.

The long postwar generation of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of which we now must be standing at the far chronological end, begins with the publication of Frank Merry Stenton'sAnglo-Saxon Englandin 1943. Stenton was sixty-three when his great book appeared. Rarely has a large synthetic treatment simultaneously presented the state of the existing question and set the agenda for the next thirty or forty years.
A Historiographical Survey: Norman and Plantagenet Kings since World War II
Authors: Alexander James W.
Published: February 2004

If the sacred back was not always safe from family and associates in the Anglo-Saxon period, still less was it proffered in the Norman and Angevin periods. William I endured the rebellion of one son, William II an accidental death while hunting; Henry I suppressed a baronial rebellion in favor of his feckless brother Robert Curthose; Stephen's reign was characterized by lawlessness and rebellion on behalf of Empress Matilda. Henry II found his whole family actively at war against him, Richard I met his death in a political quarrel in Aquitaine, John was constrained by a rebellion of many barons to issue Magna Carta, Henry III faced constant baronial opposition to his policies, Edward I was compelled to face magnate disquiet from 1297 to 1300, Edward II was deposed (and betrayed by his wife). Edward III alone of the kings discussed in this portion of my article reigned withal quietly (after 1341) and successfully (in terms of familial and baronial opposition, at least until 1376). This is not a happy picture, but it is one that reminds us that family relations were vital to successful kingship and that a king must, if successful, be a canny politician. Unlike Rosenthal, I have chosen to limit my discussion of royal biography for the period 1066–1377 to pointing out the sources that have appeared in print since 1945 and to book-length royal biographies; no longer is it true (in the words of Sidney Painter written in 1949 that prefaced his study ofThe Reign of King John) that, “when I started to write this volume, there was no adequate account of the reign of a medieval English king.
The British Cabinet and the Anglo-French Staff Talks, 1905–1914: Who Knew What and When Did He Know It?
Authors: Coogan John W. , Coogan Peter F.
Published: February 2004

The role of the British cabinet in the Anglo-French military conversations prior to the First World War has been and remains controversial. The acrimonious debate within the government during November 1911 seems linked inextricably to the flood of angry memoirs that followed August 1914 and to the continuing historical debate over the actions and motivations of the various ministers involved. Two generations of researchers now have examined an enormous body of evidence, yet the leading modern scholars continue to publish accounts that differ on the most basic questions. Historians have proved no more able than the ministers themselves were to reconcile the contradictory statements of honorable men. The persistence of these differences in historical literature demonstrates both the continuing confusion over the cabinet's role in the military conversations and the need for a renewed effort to resolve this confusion.

The starting point for any discussion of the staff talks must be the recognition that the meaning of the term changed significantly over the nine years before the outbreak of World War I. The contacts began with a series of informal discussions between senior British and French officers during 1905. The first systematic conversations took place early in January 1906 under the authority of Lord Esher, a permanent member of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), and Sir George Clarke, the CID secretary. Later in that month a small group of ministers, including Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, sanctioned formal, ongoing exchanges between the two general staffs.
Gunpowder, Treason, and Scots
Authors: Wormald Jenny
Published: February 2004

On November 9, 1605, the warden and fellows of All Souls College wrote to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, in some distress, and, as they thought, on a matter of considerable importance. Then, as now, they elected fellows at the beginning of November. On this occasion, they believed it essential to explain that they had turned down a nominee of Salisbury and the king; the man had failed to turn up for examination, and the college nervously pointed out that it did have its academic standards. But it could assure Salisbury that another candidate of the king's was safely in. This letter is the first of many ironies of the Gunpowder Plot. It was not unusual for colleges to worry about the pressure applied by the crown and its leading ministers to their selection procedures. That this anxiety should have preoccupied this institution at this particular time is nevertheless a delightful example of the differing priorities of philosophers and kings.

For the letter was written four days after men had learned the stupendous news that the king, the queen, at least one of their children, the lords temporal and spiritual, the judges, the leading members of the House of Commons, any foreign ambassadors present, and no doubt many others as well—King James put the figure at thirty thousand—were to be blown up by the Catholics.
The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I
Authors: Fincham Kenneth , Lake Peter
Published: February 2004

In a sermon preached at Hampton Court on September 30, 1606, John King proclaimed that “our Solomon or Pacificus liveth.” James I had “turned swords into sithes and spears into mattocks, and set peace within the borders of his own kingdoms and of nations about us.” His care for the “Church and maintenance to it” was celebrated. All that remained was for his subjects to lay aside contentious matters and join “with his religious majesty in propagation of the gospel and faith of Christ.” The sermon was the last in a series of four preached—and later printed—at the king's behest before an unwilling audience of Scottish Presbyterians. The quartet outlined James's standing as a ruler by divine right and laid down the conceptual foundations of the Jacobean church. A godly prince, exercising his divinely ordained powers as head of church and state, advised by godly bishops, themselves occupying offices of apostolic origin and purity, would preside over a new golden age of Christian peace and unity. A genuinely catholic Christian doctrine would be promulgated and maintained; peace and order would prevail. James I was rex pacificus, a new Constantine, a truly godly prince. As he himself observed in 1609, “my care for the Lord's spiritual kingdom is so well known, both at home and abroad, as well as by my daily actions as by my printed books.”
Charles I, the Privy Council, and the Forced Loan
Authors: Cust Richard
Published: February 2004

The Forced Loan of 1626–27 has traditionally been regarded as one of the milestones of early seventeenth-century politics. The great nineteenth-century Whig historian S. R. Gardiner saw it as the product of “new counsels” by which Charles I came increasingly to rely on the royal prerogative, and he depicted the opposition to this as a principled defense of Englishmen's liberties. Others writing in the same tradition have generally echoed these views. Thus the loan has been presented as the climax to a first stage of struggle between “Court” and “Country” or as a staging post on the “high road to Civil War.” Latterly, however, this verdict has come into question.

With the work of “localist” and “revisionist” historians we have come to appreciate more clearly the extent of attachment to the local community and the continual striving toward consensus in relations between king and subject. This has led to a general revaluation of what have traditionally been regarded as clashes of principle. Local historians have stressed that opposition to taxes generally owed far more to backsliding and provincial inertia than to any concern for constitutional propriety. And a greater understanding of the problems of administration—particularly in wartime—has led to a recognition that government decision making was often a reflex action, prompted by the immediate need to make ends meet. These insights have been incorporated into the work of Conrad Russell, who has provided the most recent assessment of the loan.