bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The City Parochial Charities: The “Dead Hand” in Late Victorian London
Authors: Owen David
Published: February 2004

In the familiar line “Time makes ancient good uncouth”, James Russell Lowell enunciated what can almost stand as a natural law of endowed charities. Over the decades, as social values change and new institutional arrangements develop, obsolescence becomes the inevitable destiny of masses of these benefactions in perpetuity, especially those with specific and rigid trusts. And broadly speaking, the more ancient the good, the more uncouth it will seem in the light of latter-day needs.

The goodly company of Victorian reformers numbered in its varied ranks a small group of individuals whose particular concern was the condition of Britain's charities. Here, they suspected, was a national resource that might be made to contribute more productively to the new age. Early in the century Henry Brougham had professed to see in properly administered endowments the basis for an adequate system of elementary education, and had inspired the exhaustive survey of the nation's nearly thirty thousand charitable trusts. The inquiry lasted for two decades, cost more than £250,000, and filled about forty volumes — the “Domesday Book of Charities.” Parliament took nearly fifteen years to act on the report, and in the end granted to the Charity Commission (the agency that emerged from it all) less ample powers of initiative and supervision than the more eager reformers had demanded. As a general thing, only when the administration of an endowment became so scandalous as to raise questions of breach of trust or when its objects were so antiquated as virtually to immobilize the charity was the state inclined to intervene.
British Class Consciousness and The Labour Party
Authors: Epstein Leon D.
Published: February 2004

Customarily, the British Labour party has been regarded as the natural product of an advanced industrial society. Given a sufficiently developed economy, like Britain's in the early years of the twentieth century, it was assumed that a socialist working-class party was due to emerge as an increasingly large and effective force. In this democratized version of Marxism, the absence of such a party in the United States had to be explained as the result of the relative immaturity of American industrial society. Labor in the United States was on the same political road as labor in Western Europe, but well behind. Especially did it seem behind labor in Britain, “the country in which modern Capitalism first emerged to full growth — the country which was, therefore, the pioneer of Labour organisation.

That this entire approach needs to be reconsidered is now plain. Recent American political trends fail to support the expectation of a European-style working-class movement in the United States, and this type of party in Western Europe itself appears by this time to have had more of a past than it has a future. Socialism is hardly a thriving faith in advanced western nations, and the old class base for protest movements is being shaken as Western European societies share larger national products, assimilate increasingly their higher paid workers to bourgeois styles of life, decrease the proportion of manualists in the total work force, and provide wider educational opportunities. As Aneurin Bevan said deploringly of the new generation of British working-class voters, whose support Labour had failed to attract in the 1959 general election, “This section of the population has become thoroughly Americanized.”
Economy and Society in Medieval England
Authors: Thrupp Sylvia L.
Published: February 2004

In British historiography, economic and social history were first thrown together when both were young and backward offshoots of the study of institutions. Economic history, by exploring records in which no one else was interested and making some use of the elements of economic theory, rapidly outgrew that status. But social history lags and its future is uncertain. It has no special records to call its own, for its materials, though rich, are embedded in all classes of documentation. It has no generally recognized set of questions to call its own, for although historians have always drawn on political science for questions relating to the state and to constitutions, and are respectful of economics, they have been distrustful of sociology because this has not yet done much with long run problems of change. Is social history then to become another specialty, working out its questions as it goes along? This course would not rule out the need of defining better its relation to other specialties. Is social history to remain a mere footnote to politics and law, literature and art, science and technology, describing the ways in which these impinge on social custom? If these points are numerous and puzzling, can it fulfil the promise of the school of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, becoming the nucleus of a new kind of historical synthesis? Or has it only some peculiar affiliation with economic history?

These questions can be answered only through new work and discussion of it. They give point to commentary on some recent English work on the medieval period.
The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII: a Question of Perspective
Authors: Smith Lacey Baldwin
Published: February 2004

That mighty prince, Henry VIII, died on Friday, the 28th of January, 1547, at two of the morning. The final years of the reign had been moving ponderously and inexorably to this moment when the King must die. The instant, however, that Henry slipped from life into death, a fundamental change took place. Not only was an irascible old man gone but so also was the dread and anxiety that had surrounded the concluding months of the King's life. For half a decade Tudor England had lived with the terrible certainty that Henry's reign was drawing to a close and the equally terrible uncertainty of not knowing when death would claim its sovereign. Thrice within the final year, in March, October, and December, Henry had approached death and had drawn away. No prediction could be secure, no plan assured so long as the moment of death remained unrecorded.

If Henry's death cleared the air and dispersed the atmosphere of fear and insecurity enveloping those who attended upon his passing, it also introduced a new and befuddling note for those who must record and narrate his departure. The ultimate irony of the historical profession is that the historian is a victim of his own knowledge; the breadth of his vision backward through the glass of time distorts his image of the past. He knows when, where and how the old King died; he can even date the event to the hour. In contrast, those who so impatiently awaited or dreaded the sovereign's demise could only speculate and form their plans upon the slender thread of surmise.
Sir Lewis Namier Considered
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C.
Published: February 2004

The late Sir Lewis Namier seems to have the highest, or nearly the highest authority of historians, chiefly for his work on English politics in the 1760's. This article attempts to make a judgment of his authority by examining the truth of his findings about English politics in the 1760's. Namier's authority is in great part based upon his seeming care in his researches, since people suppose that those who are occupied with details are careful with details. The results of his researches must therefore be considered in their presentation. But these researches need not be redone, at least for the purpose of understanding Namier's findings; for his findings rest upon an argument — an argument constructed not only from the results of researches but from general statements that are not results of his researches. Indeed, it happens that Namier's general statements fall within political science, as that subject has been understood since Aristotle. The present writer is a political scientist, and proposes to concentrate on Namier's argument.

Namier's principal conclusion is that there was no danger of tyranny in Britain in the 1760's. His argument has two parts, or he has two arguments: the apparent danger of tyranny is explained and deflated, first by the heir-apparent cycle, and second by the superiority of modern party government. He reaches his conclusion by denying effect to the source of danger usually identified by historians and thoughtful contemporaries, the influence of Bolingbroke — so that he seems, to one critic, to ignore the importance of “ideas.”
Too Many Cooks: British Planning Before Saratoga
Authors: Willcox William B.
Published: February 2004

The climax in the long story of Britain's blunders during the War of Independence is the campaign of 1777, the planning of which, in Whitehall and New York, was the worst that the British perpetrated in the seven years of hostilities. Their strategy in 1781 was even more disastrous in its outcome, but far more defensible in its design; the strategy of 1777 can scarcely be defended at all. It rested upon premises that many observers at the time recognized to be wildly fallacious, and it brought its due reward — the surrender that led directly to French intervention.

The campaign had no unifying concept. An army from Canada advanced by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson toward Albany, where it was supposed to be joined by a small detachment marching down the Mohawk; far to the south a substantial garrison was immobilized on Manhattan, while the main field army attacked Philadelphia by the most roundabout route it could have chosen. The British thus had three armies (ignoring, as they tended to do, their small garrison on Rhode Island), each isolated from the other two; and the Americans were free to concentrate against whichever one they chose. This was dispersion of force carried to the point of absurdity. Why was the absurdity not apparent to the Commander in Chief? to General Burgoyne? to the King's ministers in London? The question has been endlessly debated, and no final answer is possible. But an examination of the men who were principally responsible for the outcome suggests that two major factors were at work.
Edmund Burke: A Generation of Scholarship and Discovery
Authors: Bryant Donald C.
Published: February 2004

In his essay on “The Reputation of Edmund Burke” Thomas W. Copeland offers a timely analysis of the context and climate of contemporary Burke studies. His remarks suggest also the acceleration in pace of those studies. Current publication relevant to Burke has been noticed for the past four years in theBurke Newsletter. Reporting and reviewing new publication on or near Burke, retailing schemes and dreams and work in progress, and purveying personal news and opinion of students of Burke, theBurke Newsletterresembles in scope theJohnsonian Newsletter, edited by James L. Clifford and John H. Middendorf at Columbia University, which, of course, has for some time kept its readers up to date on the bibliography of the age of Burke and Johnson.

Copeland's essay, furthermore, is sufficient counterweight to another recent critical appraisal professedly directed to something of the same purpose – W. T. Laprade's impatient, hostile excursion through a century or more of writing on Burke. Without attempting the detail of theNewsletter, therefore, and without retreading Copeland's ground, the present survey undertakes to provide an account of significant trends and characteristic contributions in Burke studies for roughly the period since World War II. That span of years covers the time, or a little more, that the main body of Burke's papers has been generally open for study. It also includes the time when ideological and socio-political patterns have stimulated resort to the familiar past for spokesmen and scapegoats with whom to undergird and extenuate contemporary controversy.
George Webb Hall and The Agricultural Association
Authors: Spring David , Crosby Travis L.
Published: February 2004

T. S. Ashton has described the Industrial Revolution in England as a time when the “chimney stacks rose to dwarf the ancient spires.” He has also described it as a time when the voluntary association replaced state initiative in governmental affairs. These two phenomena of modern society – the urban industrial complex and the growth of public opinion – are usually paired. Perhaps it is natural to think of the growth of public opinion as something made possible by the growth of cities.

Yet it is known that the Industrial Revolution profoundly affected not only the cities but the countryside as well; that the new technology prompted (among other things) an enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. This is evident in the formation of numerous societies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were devoted to purely agricultural pursuits. With the decline of rural prosperity after 1815, however, there arose societies of a different sort which had as their object not the improvement of farming through better techniques but the improvement of agriculture through political action. Both kinds of society revealed the stirrings of public opinion in the countryside.

This essay is concerned with the second type of society, which rose and spread among what are loosely termed the tenant farmers of England. These societies were numerous enough and sufficiently of one mind to take on the character of a movement. The movement was to fail, as agrarian movements are notorious for doing.
James Ramsay MacDonald and the Leadership of the Labour Party, 1918-22*
Authors: Lyman Richard W.
Published: February 2004

The return of James Ramsay MacDonald from the depths of defeat in 1918 to the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1922 is a dramatic episode in twentieth-century British politics. It has added piquancy because the drama was played in reverse nine years later; indeed, MacDonald's behavior between 1918 and 1922 has usually been seen as a prelude to the “betrayal” of 1931.

He owed his election as leader to the support of the Left. Consequently he has been charged with hypocrisy; in the words of Philip Snowden:

… MacDonald had been actively canvassing among his friends for support, and he had been especially concerned to get the support of the new Scottish members. During the time that he had been out of Parliament he had contributed a weekly article to the Glasgow Socialist paper Forward, in which he had played up to the Left Wing, an attitude strikingly different from that he had pursued when in the House of Commons in previous Parliaments.

Some standard modern accounts repeat Snowden's charge, or make it independently. Even those that do not accuse MacDonald of deliberate deception nevertheless portray the Left as having acted under a misapprehension. The Clyde Members, says Francis Williams, “mistakenly judged him to be much more to the Left than he was and assumed, because of his opposition to the war, that he shared their views of the nature of the class struggle.” G. D. H. Cole agreed: had the I.L.P. understood MacDonald's moderation, “they would not have played the part they did in reinstating him and holding him firm in the leadership of the Labour Party.”
The Irony of English Feudalism
Authors: Hollister C. Warren
Published: February 2004

Everyone is familiar with the story of how William the Conqueror brought feudalism to England. Despite some recent voices to the contrary, medievalists are for the most part inclined to agree that the Norman Conquest introduced the fief into a previously non-feudal land. Moreover, since feudalism did not arise in England gradually and of its own accord but instead was imposed from above by an all-powerful conqueror, it is usually described as more symmetrical — more “perfect” — than the feudalism of the Continent. One historian, reflecting the views of many others, asserted recently that in the years after 1066 “England became the most perfectly feudal kingdom in the West.”

It is well to be wary, however, of too much perfection in an institution such as feudalism. It is always possible that in identifying an institution at a particular point in time and space as “perfect” or “nearly perfect” one is being misled by the surface appearances which usually accompany decay. As institutions become less and less relevant to their societies, they are apt, for a while at least, to assume the appearance of increasing orderliness, increasing selfconscious coherence, increasing formalism. These tendencies have been noted by a number of sociologists and have by no means escaped the attention of Professor Parkinson. To determine whether they apply to the so-called model feudalism of Norman England is both hazardous and difficult, but the effort must be made. So much has been written on the question of whether any real traces of feudalism can be detected in England before the Conquest that it may prove refreshing to scrutinize critically the “ideal” feudal state of post-Conquest times, particularly if it can be shown that Anglo-Norman feudalism was not so perfect after all.
Garrett Mattingly, Historian and Man of Letters
Authors: Wright Louis B.
Published: February 2004

The last published work of Garrett Mattingly, The “Invincible” Armada and Elizabethan England in the Folger Library series of “Booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilization,” demonstrates his remarkable clarity of perception as a historian and his capacity for presenting fresh and original conclusions based on new factual research. This booklet is by no means a summary of the information in his full-length study, The Armada, published in 1959. On the contrary, it contains several new points of view developed since the publication of the earlier book, and it will stand as a model of succinct historical analysis, written with such ease and charm that a casual reader may not realize that it has far greater significance than many a ponderous tome.

Mattingly was in many ways an old-fashioned historian who showed no interest in, or regard for, current fads in historical interpretation. Controversies that mean so much to many would-be revisionists today — and mar so much contemporary historical writing — found no reflection in Mattingly's works. Yet few historians of this generation exceeded him in the quality and quantity of new knowledge that he unearthed and the significance of the interpretations that this knowledge made obvious. Mattingly was a revisionist, but the revisions that he made were based on factual information that nobody else had previously shown the ingenuity or the diligence to discover. Mattingly did not spin an hypothesis from his own brain and then go in search of something to prove it.
No Agonizing Reappraisal
Authors: Mullett Charles F.
Published: February 2004

Every man, according to Bacon, is a debtor to his profession. Although the historian pays his debt by devotion to truth, unless he has thought about truth as well as worshipped it he may — to adapt a figure from Bishop Berkeley — become a thriving earthworm but he will surely make a sorry historian. So vermiculate a metaphor need not prompt every disciple of Clio to compose a penetrating Idea of History, but it may properly incite him to give life to his facts by evoking the universal while documenting the specific, by preferring insights to formulas, and by recalling that historiographical clichés and historical facts — modern saws and ancient instances — go ill together. If the historian of the ancient world benefits from built-in ignorance, the historian of the modern world suffers from built-in knowledge, not merely because of the mountain of fact but because this very mountain permits him to let a tissue of fact do duty for history. Absence of metaphysics is too high a price for erudition.

For some years historians have been revolting against easy generalizations and after-mindedness. Their revolt does not find expression in systems, which carry farthest the very practices exciting revolt, but in analysis of assumptions. The critical historian explores his topic in its own terms, not in terms of later dogmas; he reconstructs ideas and institutions in their own context, not as the shape of things to come; he considers his characters in their own environment, not as ancestors; he replaces anonymous society and impersonal forces with living men and women.
Samuel Johnson and “Natural Law”
Authors: Greene Donald J.
Published: February 2004

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.

The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.
The London Press and the First Decade of American Independence, 1783-1793
Authors: Ritcheson Charles R.
Published: February 2004

The years immediately following the War for American Independence have been rightly called the “critical period” in the history of the United States. Internal order, stability, even national existence were the issues of the struggle culminating in the Constitution. The times were critical for the new nation, too, in the regulation of her external affairs. The French attempted to make her a satellite. The Spanish would forbid her the Mississippi. By far the greatest problem in foreign affairs, however, was the reestablishment of peace-time relations with Britain, the erstwhile Mother Country.

Anglo-American relations during the decade after the Peace of 1783 have claimed much attention from American historians. Disagreement about internal developments are often bitter; but evaluations of British policy toward the former colonies are remarkably unanimous. Whether “Federalist” or “Jeffersonian,” American writers generally depict Britain as the villain. Beaten in war and vengeful, she manifested “disgust and exultation” at the difficulties which befell the new republic. Seizing upon every occasion to show her “casual contempt,” Britain adopted a policy based on “an intention of humiliating the Americans”; and her subjects plotted “how to punish their former colonies.” The British nation resolved to disregard the Treaty of 1783 with a callousness and a cynicism which made a mockery of their pledged word.

Resting upon studies in the voluminous American sources, these judgements and assumptions correctly reflect the convictions of many important Americans of the time. They accord but little, however, with a dispassionate examination of British sources.
Army and Society in England 1870-1900: A Reassessment of the Cardwell Reforms*
Authors: Tucker Albert V.
Published: February 2004

Between 1870 and 1900 British military organization was extensively revised by act of Parliament. The reforms went further than any previous changes in the history of the British army. They were so enduring that the modem British army has its foundation in these years, particularly in the legislation associated with the name of Edward Cardwell, Gladstone's Secretary of State for War in the Whig-Liberal Ministry of 1868-74. The Cardwell reforms were a vital part of that ministry's legislation to diminish the influence of privilege and acknowledge the place of merit and efficiency in the professions, the civil service, education, and the army. Cardwell's legislation for the army, however, was not so beneficial as historians have implied. Too much of the existent knowledge of British military organization in the late nineteenth century is based on a sympathy with those reforms which glosses over their weaknesses and makes alternative schemes seem reactionary. The Cardwell reforms were neither so new nor so radical in their effects as many reformers intended. A detailed study of army organization between the Crimean and the Boer Wars leads to the conclusion that much of the old continued while many of the changes made under Cardwell failed to take hold. It is time that more emphasis was placed on this conservative aspect of British military history rather than on the liberal and novel features of army reform in the late Victorian period. Why was it, for example, that the country which was the first to experience technological and industrial change on a national scale, and which extended its colonial empire farther than any power in Europe, was also the last among European powers to transform an eighteenth-century army into an instrument of modern warfare?
Lord Cromer: Practitioner and Philosopher of Imperialism
Authors: Tignor Robert L.
Published: February 2004

For many Englishmen Lord Cromer was the embodiment of the British imperial tradition. As one who had spent the greater part of his lifetime in the East representing British power and had crowned his career by being virtual ruler of occupied Egypt from 1883 to 1907, he had come increasingly to symbolize the proconsular tradition in British imperialism. His retirement from his post as Consul-General of Egypt had seemed to many the end of an era. Or as the editors of the Living Age had put it:

Lord Cromer's was a masterful personality, but the real field of its ascendancy came to lie as the years of his tenure of power lengthened out, rather in England than in Egypt. He became the center of a legend, the typical figure of modern imperialism, which dominated our foreign policy.

Thus, to the supporter of an imperial policy he was “the regenerator of Egypt” and “the empire-builder”; and to the anti-imperialists, heirs of the Gladstonian tradition, the suppressor of Egyptian liberties and the tyrant of the East. In the latter years of his administration of Egypt the mere mention of his name in Parliament was enough to touch off a lively debate on the merits of imperialism.

Unfortunately, Cromer's reputation as a typical imperialist has obscured the fact that in the early years of his life he was not known for his imperialistic ideals. Quite the contrary, he was considered by others and considered himself a liberal of Gladstonian persuasion.
Towards A Re-Evaluation of Medieval English Generalship
Authors: Beeler John
Published: February 2004

Some thirty years ago A. H. Thompson, writing on war in the Middle Ages, concluded that “European warfare in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shews [sic] a somewhat bewildering variety of practice behind which lies no constructive idea.” This was a mild verdict indeed, for at the time Thompson wrote it was commonplace to condemn the generals of the Middle Ages for every sin in the military lexicon, whether of commission or omission, from mere stupidity to utter incompetence. This contempt for medieval generalship can, as a matter of fact, be traced back to the sixteenth century and Machiavelli's denunciations of the condottieri captains. There were, of course, certain exceptions to be noted, but they were cited only to prove that occasionally a flash lit up the general gloom. Thus, William the Conqueror's masterly campaign of September-December 1066 had long been recognized; Edward IV was sometimes referred to as “the first modern general;” J. E. Morris established the reputation of Edward I as a tactical innovator; and Robert I, the Bruce, was admitted by even so contemptuous a critic as Sir Charles Oman to have laid down a proper strategy for the conduct of operations against the English. And, scattered here and there throughout the vast literature on the Middle Ages are indications of a vague awareness that perhaps the generalship of the period was not so lacking in purpose and professional competence as had generally been alleged. It is necessary only to recall B. H. Liddell Hart's scathing comments on the military high commands of World War I to be reminded that generals of all ages have been subject to searching post facto criticism.
The Tudor Commonweal and the Sense of Change
Authors: Ferguson Arthur B.
Published: February 2004

The key to early Renaissance thought in England has often, and rightly, been sought in that twilight zone which is both medieval and modern in character, yet is, in a sense, neither. In that indistinct area the early Tudor view of society expressed in the concept of the “very and true commonweal” constitutes a prominent but equivocal landmark. Any student of the period knows that the idea was conservative, even reactionary in its implications, inspired in large part by a suspicious distaste for the changes that were taking place in early sixteenth-century England. Those, on the other hand, who have read at all carefully the comments made by these same Englishmen on the state of their own society know that they accepted in varying degrees the facts of change, subjected them to an often searching analysis, and in several important instances arrived at constructive policies on the basis of their analysis of social cause. What, then, is one to make of this paradox presented by constructive realism deployed in the cause of a reactionary social ideal, exploration of change conducted within an ostensibly static framework? Perhaps, as with so many aspects of early Renaissance thought, the difficulty is more apparent than real. Perhaps the commonwealth idea was not so nearly static as it appeared. Perhaps, indeed, the traditional formulas in which it ordinarily found expression simply mask a new sense of change, a dawning awareness of social process.

Failure to understand the true nature of the ambivalence that seems at times to be built into the thought of the period, failure in particular to allow for the divergence between traditional theory, part of the rich legacy of medieval thought, and fresh attitudes prompted by actual experience in a time of revolutionary change, has too often resulted in failure also to appreciate the significance of the early Tudor pamphleteers and commentators of various sorts who examined their society with an eye both critical and constructive.
English Franchise Reform in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Bushman Richard L.
Published: February 2004

The roots of franchise reform in the seventeenth century are of interest to historians both of Britain and of America. In the new world and in England important steps toward democratic suffrage were taken in the first half of the century. The Virginia charter of 1619 granted voting privileges to all adult male inhabitants regardless of property. Later governments qualified this liberality, but an important precedent was established. In England Leveller tracts and the classic Putney Debates aired arguments that bore no immediate practical fruits but that foreshadowed later reforms. Both developments are startling enough to raise urgent questions about origins. Where did such striking innovations come from? Were they altogether unprecedented, or were they, as seems more probable, modifications of already existing ideas about suffrage?

In both cases tentative explanations have been proposed. The generous provisions of the Virginia charter have been accounted for by the desire of the colony's sponsors to attract settlers. Unusual political privileges were a lure to draw Englishmen to the new world. The soldiers' insistence on a wider franchise has been attributed to three factors: the confidence they derived from their large role in Cromwell's victories, the logical development of the natural right and contract theory of government, and the democratic impulse implicit in Puritan Independency. Heady with military successes and religious zeal, the soldiers boldly carried the conception of contract to its conclusion and demanded that Parliament be elected by the people to whom it was theoretically responsible.
Lawrence H. Gipson and the First British Empire: an Evaluation
Authors: Lower A. R. M.
Published: February 2004

North Americans are today living through a period of historic commemorations: the centennial of the Civil War, the centennial in 1967 of the Dominion of Canada, and a striking series of bicentennials, few years which lack their events to remember or to celebrate. Two hundred years ago this year the Treaty of Paris was signed. It and the events of which it was the culmination and the outcome changed the course of history, for they determined that England, not France, was to give her language and culture to that large part of the lands beyond the seas over which the fighting had taken place. No period has been more closely examined. The examination has gone on for the two centuries intervening, and will go on. In 1959 there appeared several new books on Wolfe and the taking of Quebec: by 2059 no doubt there will be still others. Why not? In those years a world was changing hands.

Gipson's huge work is the latest full dress account of the period, and so wide is its scope that it has been in the making for over thirty years.The British Empire before the American Revolutionhas now reached its tenth volume. Two more are planned: one to cover the period 1770-75, one to include comments on other accounts and bibliographical material. Since Volume X actually reaches only to 1766, it may be that the author will, if spared, add three. The undertaking has built up into a massive historical structure.
Castlereagh and the Peace of Europe
Authors: Graubard Stephen R.
Published: February 2004

This paper is concerned with two different sorts of problems. It is an attempt to explain and interpret the diplomatic and political concepts which guided Castlereagh and his fellow-negotiators at Vienna; it also raises questions about certain conventional interpretations of the nature of Castlereagh's own accomplishment. The credit generally accorded Castlereagh for his work at Vienna derives largely from the acceptance of conclusions reached by the late Sir Charles Webster. Since Webster's analysis reversed an earlier adverse judgment on Castlereagh, it must not be thought that the purpose of this study is to reassert the old view. Quite the contrary; the intention, very simply, is to ask whether Webster and those who have followed him have not neglected to ask certain sorts of questions about the Napoleonic era, most particularly about the climate of opinion which prevailed at that time. While twentieth-century historians have succeeded in rescuing Castlereagh from his critics, it is just possible that they have tended to think of his accomplishment in terms more appropriate to this century than to the early nineteenth. As a result, they may praise him for qualities which are less remarkable than they imagine, while failing to appreciate his unique capacities, which were not so much intellectual as diplomatic.

This should not be taken to imply that a fundamental revision of the main outlines of this period is in prospect. The debt owed Sir Charles Webster by those who have followed him in the study of early nineteenth-century European diplomacy is not likely soon to be redeemed. Had Webster's sole accomplishment been to create order in an area where something like chaos had previously existed, this would have been reason enough to perpetuate his memory. By his imaginative and meticulous methods, however, he achieved considerably more than this; he restored a reputation which had too long remained in question and showed conclusively that certain traditional judgments about the Vienna accords reflected a thinly veiled political bias. Webster succeeded in doing what Lord Robert Cecil, the later Lord Salisbury, attempted in 1862 in the Quarterly Review, where he expatiated on the unusual qualities of the man who served as British Foreign Secretary in the tumultuous decade 1812 to 1822.
The Evangelical Inheritance
Authors: Meacham Standish
Published: February 2004

Evangelicals and Evangelicalism seem unable to remain for long either in or out of favor. The line of periodic assessments which began by moving upward from the tart jibes of Sydney Smith to James Stephen's measured rehabilitation, took a plunge with the Hammond's indignant assault, and has continued to trace lesser fluctuations for the past thirty years. E. M. Howse, in Saints in Politics, attacked the Hammonds for lack of balance and attempted a rehabilitation. In the process, however, he lost his own balance and fell over backwards. Now Ford K. Brown's Fathers of the Victorians implies that one can again disparage the Evangelicals. Their legacy to the century, Brown suggests, was a negative and stifling one.

This matter of the legacy makes the question of interpretation and reinterpretation important. Historians of nineteenth-century England agree that Evangelicalism contributed much to the temper of the age. Yet there agreement ceases. Brown, for example, thinks that the legacy, never a rich one, was ill-spent by the likes of Charlotte Brönte's sour-souled Mr. Brocklehurst. Noel Annan, rather, finds it husbanded and flourishing in the sensitive conscience of Leslie Stephen. Both may be right. If so, merely further proof of the strength and complexity of the Evangelical inheritance; further indication, therefore, of the need for its careful examination.

The legacy cannot be examined apart from its source: the Evangelical faith itself. Without an understanding of that faith, one cannot know that while Zachary Macaulay was an Evangelical, Granville Sharp was not; without that understanding the true difference between the Evangelical morality of Henry Thornton and the humanitarian morality of Henry Brougham will go undetected.
Life in the Dying World of Sail, 1870-1910
Authors: Foulke Robert D.
Published: February 2004

By its beauty and grace the sailing ship invites that nostalgic sentimentality often bestowed upon relics of the past. Visitors who notice the inscription on the Cutty Sark at Greenwich are asked to share this veneration: “Here to commemorate an era the Cutty Sark has been preserved as a tribute to the ships and men of the merchant navy in the days of sail. They mark our passage as a race of men/ Earth will not see such ships as these again.” The image of the “glorious” last days of sail is largely the creation of retired seamen-writers. In an unfinished essay written just before his death in 1924, Joseph Conrad summarizes the era of the sailing ship with typical nostalgia:

The last days of sailing ships were short if one thinks of the countless ages since the first sail of leather or rudely woven rushes was displayed to the wind. Stretching the period both ways to the utmost, it lasted from 1850 to 1910. Just sixty years. Two generations. The winking of an eye. Hardly the time to drop a prophetic tear. For the pathos of that era lies in the fact that when the sailing ships and the art of sailing them reached their perfection, they were already doomed. It was a swift doom, but it is consoling to know that there was no decadence.

“Doom” without “decadence” — like the death of a beautiful woman in her prime — is the seaman-writer's usual elegy for the sailing ship.
Britain, America, and the Far East, 1937-1940: a Failure in Cooperation
Authors: Clifford Nicholas R.
Published: February 2004

Most of the scholarly works on British policy in the years preceding World War II have neglected events in the Far East in favor of those in Europe. Any study of recent British diplomacy is, of course, seriously hampered by the lack of Foreign Office documents and by the generally uninformative nature of British memoirs. Nevertheless, the sources which do exist give a picture which, while still incomplete, is interesting for its own sake in showing how the Chamberlain Government met the problems of the Pacific, and also for the light which it sheds on Anglo-American relations in this period. Perhaps nowhere else was there as much consistent misunderstanding and disappointment between London and Washington as over the questions raised by the Sino-Japanese War. The Manchurian episode had left a legacy of distrust between the two countries; just enough was known about the approaches made by the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, so that many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that Britain had rejected American offers for joint action against Japan in 1932, and that as a result nothing had prevented the Japanese advance. When Stimson's The Far Eastern Crisis appeared in 1936, it was read by many with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and seemed to confirm these views. In Britain it provided ammunition for the critics of the Government, while in the United States it increased the suspicions of those unwilling to trust Britain, and strengthened the trend to isolation.
History and Historical Criticism: Recent Work of Richardson and Sayles
Authors: Schuyler Robert Livingston
Published: February 2004

The collaboration of Richardson and Sayles in the investigation of early English parliamentary history has long been justly celebrated. A full generation has passed since the publication of the first of those studies of theirs which have done so much to widen and deepen knowledge about medieval parliaments and have made their names, usually coupled, household words with students of medieval English constitutional history. The authors were influenced, no doubt, by some earlier historians, and the statement that they built on foundations laid by Maitland and McIlwain is not incorrect. In the volume, however, which is here under special consideration,The Governance of Mediaeval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta, they do not undertake,quahistorians as distinguished from historical critics, to come this side of the reign of King John, when parliaments had not as yet assumed their later form and functions.

I

Why, it seems not inappropriate to ask, was this latest joint product of their historical activities written; to what class or classes of readers was it particularly addressed? It was evidently not designed as a manual of the type that students of English constitutional history have long been familiar with; for one thing, its chronological scope is limited to about two centuries, fromc. 1000 to 1215; and much of the book would be unintelligible to beginning students of the subject. An apologia, which serves as a Preface, and a preliminary chapter suggest answers to the questions that have just been asked.
Regal Power and the Rule of Law: a Tudor Paradox
Authors: Dunham William Huse
Published: February 2004

Tudor statesmen, in their statutes and debates, and Tudor jurists, in reports and treatises, recorded their awareness of an antithesis between regal power and political law. Political action and juridical argument made them increasingly sensitive to an oppugnancy between executive authority and constitutional control. Medieval men of law, too, had noted this inconsonance in England's polity. Sir John Fortescue, while Henry VI's Chancellorin-exile in 1468, faced the dilemma; but he resolved it only verbally. He wrote: “regal power is restrained by political law.” Then he added, “such is the law of the Kingdom” of England. So facile a formula as Fortescue's might make nice theory, yet it was one easier to prescribe than to apply to a live monarch.

The pragmatic Tudors, however, succeeded in surmounting the antithesis between political law and regal power, paradoxically, by augmenting both. To solve immediate political crises and to enhance the effectiveness of government, Privy Councilors and parliamentarians passed act after act that increased the King's prerogatives. At the same time, moreover, these very statutes afforced, by implication, the principles of political, or public, law. Kings and queens, judges and councilors, Lords and Commons during the sixteenth century formulated a concept of the rule of law and made it transcendant. By the 1590's they had accorded the rule of law statutory, judicial, and regal recognition. For the Tudor time-being, this principle served to balance regal power and political law and to give to this antinomy a congruity.
The Independents Reconsidered
Authors: Underdown David
Published: February 2004

It seems impossible to begin an article these days without invoking, either as saint or devil, the shade of Sir Lewis Namier. Those who inhabit regions remote from the classic years around 1760 are absolved from acquiring more than a general understanding of the reversionary interest, the Court and Treasury party, and the rest of the Namierite stock in trade. Yet the merits and limitations of the methodology must concern and fascinate scholars who reassess the traditional interpretations of other periods of English history. They should not, as the Master of Peterhouse has warned, swallow the Namier method whole. But used with due caution, it may offer valuable insights for other centuries besides the eighteenth. The rigorous compilation and analysis of biographical data, the penetration of ideological smokescreens to the deeper motives behind them, the ruthless discarding of outworn shibboleths like “party,” the careful use of sociological criteria: at their best the Namierites have much to offer historians of other periods. Sir John Neale has applied the method, with modifications, to the reign of Elizabeth I, Norman Gash has carried it into the age of Peel, while the authentic members of the school proceed with their task of cleaning up the eighteenth century.

The winds of Namierite change have begun to blow only fitfully, however, in the seventeenth century. One reason for this, perhaps, is that historians of the Stuart period have generally been absorbed in destroying each other on the gentry battlefield, or attempting in more constructive ways to solve the politico-economic problems of the “Century of Revolution”; there has been less effort applied to the details of parliamentary affairs.
“Sir Lewis Namier Considered” Considered
Authors: Walcott Robert
Published: February 2004

The purpose of this paper is not to reconsider Sir Lewis Namier either as a person or as a historian. Since his death in 1960 there has been a spate of critiques, ranging from sound discussions of his historical method appearing in this and in two sister journals to the treatment by a Hindu journalist of Namier and other contemporary British historians which appeared in the New Yorker magazine under a title provided by the epigraph to Sir Lewis's most famous work. Whether his work should properly be interpreted in terms of his “continental conservatism” as Sir Edward Carr suggests, or whether Namier's influence on British historiography on balance has been pernicious (as one L.S.E. don believes), are not questions with which this discussion will be concerned. Its function is much narrower; to examine a recent contribution to these pages, the article by Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., entitled “Sir Lewis Namier Considered.”

In this essay Mansfield purports to explain just how Namier interpreted the early years of George III and exactly what his line of argument was in reaching his conclusions. Inevitably the question is raised: “Was there actual danger of tyranny in the political philosophy of the youthful George III?” This is an important question to which a number of distinguished historians have turned their attention; but Mansfield does not use the methods of the historian — whether sympathetic to Namier like Richard Pares, or admittedly hostile like the Master of Peterhouse. Mansfield is not a historian but a political scientist, and he writes that he is not proposing to question Namier's investigations of political facts.