bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Brokerage at the court of Louis XIV
Authors: Kettering Sharon
Published: June 2009

For a commission brokers negotiated an exchange between those who had patronage to grant and those in need who were willing to give something in return. They received a fee for their help as intermediaries in the search for patronage. Brokerage differed from patronage in that it was a mercenary service which did not by itself create a personal bond. Noble brokers of royal patronage in the provinces and at court were prevalent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Provincial brokers included the governors, lieutenants general, intendants, clerics, first presidents of the sovereign courts, military commanders, great nobles, and any resident provincials related to, or well-known by, high-ranking court or government personages. Court brokers included all those regularly at court, and ranged from those immediately surrounding the king, as the fount of royal patronage, downward and outward in layers of influence calculated upon their distance from the king. Brokers in the provinces became less important during Louis XIV's reign because the king himself insisted on supervising the distribution of royal patronage at court. Patronage became more easily obtainable at Versailles than in the provinces, and, increasingly, nobles in need of patronage went to court to find it, aided in their search by courtiers acting as brokers. During Louis XIV's reign, an absolute monarchy sought successfully to centralize the brokerage of royal patronage at court, a hitherto unrecognized aspect of the process of social and political centralization known as early modern statebuilding.
Government and ideology during the age of whig supremacy: the political argument of Sir Robert Walpole's newspaper propagandists
Authors: Targett Simon
Published: June 2009

Contrary to received historical wisdom, Sir Robert Walpole, the pragmatist par excellence, was diverted by political ideas. Thus he invested time and an unprecedented amount of money in political newspapers. This article investigates the primary pro-government newspapers and, as well as identifying the leading circle of political writers sponsored by Walpole, addresses the varied and complex arguments that appeared in their ‘leading essay’ each week for twenty years. After identifying some common but misleading historical representations of Walpolean political thought, the article examines the treatment of three broad philosophical questions – human nature, the origin, nature and extent of government, and political morality – so demonstrating that Walpole's spokesmen were not narrowly pragmatic. Subsequently, the article focuses upon the careful pro-government response to the common charges that Walpole corrupted the political system and betrayed traditional whig values. In doing so, the article highlights the skills of some underrated eighteenth-century political writers and, more importantly, emphasizes the union of government and ideology in Walpolean political thinking.
Lord Randolph Churchill and Tory Democracy, 1880–1885
Authors: Quinault R. E.
Published: June 2009

‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Tory democracy’ is a cliché topic of late-Victorian historiography. All the monographs on Lord Randolph emphasise his enthusiasm for tory democracy. This enthusiasm has been explained by recent historians of Victorian Conservatism in terms of personal ambition rather than commitment to specific policies. But both these schools of interpretation are based on mistaken assumptions and insufficient or misleading evidence. I believe that neither the ‘orthodox’ nor the ‘revisionist’ explanations of Churchill's involvement with tory democracy fit the facts of the case in most of their aspects. The following inquiry examines the various ways in which Churchill actuallywas, or has been alleged to have been, involved with that ambiguous concept, tory democracy. This necessitates an examination of the usage and meaning which Churchill gave to the phrase and of the extent to which he associated it with progressive social policies. It is also instructive to compare Churchill's outlook with that of Gorst, his Fourth Party colleague, who was also identified with tory democracy. In order to assess the role which ambition played in determining Churchill's support for tory democracy it is necessary to consider his relations with the official tory leaders and his own political expectations. Finally, it is relevant to examine his involvement in the activities of the National Union of Conservative Associations. On the one hand, it has been argued that his role in the National Union was indicative of his desire to launch progressive toryism on a recalcitrant party, while on the other, it has been viewed simply as part of his campaign to further his own position in the party.
The Diplomacy of Finance: British Financial Missions to The United States 1914–1918
Authors: Burk Kathleen
Published: June 2009

It is a commonplace among historians of the First World War that during this period Britain and America changed positions as dorninant and subordinate financial powers. The great gap in the histories, however, has been any description of how this came about, Historians of the period have generally relied on one book, E. V. Morgan's Studies in Brtish financial policy 1914–1925 (1952), with the occasional use of Henry F. Grady's British war finance, 1914–1919 (1923). Both are very useful, and within its field Morgan in particular will be difficult to supplant; but within the context of Anglo-American relations they only treat one side of the stroy. It is clear that during the war Britain was dependent increasingly on American finance, private and later public, both to supply her civilian and military populations and to fight the war; and further, that by late 1916 decisions taken in America could have a direct bearing on British ability to finance her own operations. Once America entered the war this influence became even more direct. Negotiations over finance largely took place in America, by means of temporary and permanent missions. This article will describe the most important of these missions, and trace the gradual change in the balance of British and American financial power.
Civil Science in the Renaissance: Jurisprudence Italian Style
Authors: Kelley Donald R.
Published: June 2009

In the history of Renaissance thought and learning jurisprudence seems to be a missing term. Not that the scholarship of civil, canon and customary law is itself lacking, or lagging, but it has not been sufficiently integrated with that of other fields, and even in the modern history of the Renaissance ‘encyclopedia’ it does not hold high priority. In some modern views of the studium, in fact, law seems to stand not only below the trivium and quadrivium but even, since it lacks utility as well as liberality, below the mechanical arts. Petrarch and other humanists would no doubt be pleased at this turnabout; and others may find justice (in a historian's if not a lawyer's sense) at the fall of the profession of law from academic grace. For present purposes, however, we must try to lay aside the prejudice which many of us may feel toward lawyers, modern counterparts of the pedants derided by Petrarch and the ‘mean and mercenary’ pettifoggers denounced by Cicero. It is not the purpose here to plead the cause of Renaissance jurists; but it may be possible, by attending to some of their less celebrated (or lamented) achievements, to do some justice to their place in the history of learning.
Land Policy in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire: the Sale of Crown Lands in the Ceded Islands, 1763–1783
Authors: Murdoch D. H.
Published: June 2009

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.
William Harrison and Holinshed'S Chronicles
Authors: Parry G. J. R.
Published: June 2009

Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande are an impressive monument to the fruitful co-operation of sixteenth-century scholars. This paper explores part of the creation of the Chronicles and examines some of the complex evidence about the involvement of William Harrison, author of the informative and entertaining Description of Britain published in the Chronicles. For the discovery of a manuscript of Harrison's ‘Great English chronology’ allows a fuller appreciation of his role in the Holinshed group, and reveals tensions within the intellectual milieu from which the Chronicles emerged. The ‘Chronology’ demonstrates that Harrison's Description, written to a commission in 1576, was a deviation from the main thrust of his own work, and together with his other contributions was a late and complicating development in the genesis of the Chronicles. The ‘Chronology’ also shows that some of Harrison's work was censored by Holinshed where it offended his sense of legitimate historical discussion. Before the second edition of the Chronicles in 1587, there was further disagreement about the value of Harrison's contribution.
Procrustean Feudalism: An Interpretative Dilemma in English Historical Narration, 1700–1725
Authors: Earl D. W. L.
Published: June 2009

The emergence of a coherent narrative history of England, based upon the critical use of authorities, and written in a connected fashion rather than assembled from reproduced earlier materials, is a much slower process than such a simple statement or its requirements might suggest. The process begins in earnest in the late seventeenth century, after the historian ceases being a principal protagonist in the political pamphlet warfare of the time. The narrator must take account of advances in source criticism, and he must also cope, on the level of interpretation, with national myths that his forbears among the Tudor chroniclers and the seventeenth-century contenders had created. Miss Thompson has remarked that the main purpose of Tudor chroniclers, notably Hall and Holinshed, was to praise ‘the king's illustrious ancestors, reign by reign’.
Sir James Graham, The Baltic Campaign and War-Planning at the Admiralty in 1854
Authors: Hamilton C. I.
Published: June 2009

The majority of men who held the post of first lord of the Admiralty in the middle nineteenth century were usually of mediocre standard, and in the 1840s, significantly or not, were generally ex-governor generals of India. Sir James Graham was an exception; he had a first class mind and only narrowly missed being prime minister. He was also never governor general, although he must have been offered the post more frequently than any other man of his time! Given the dangerous international situation at the beginning of Lord Aberdeen's ministry, and the importance of naval preparedness and planning, it was plain that an experienced man was needed to head the Admiralty. Sir James was the natural choice. He had, after all, been first lord before, from 1830 to 1834, and while there he had been responsible for radical changes in naval administration. It so happened that his reforms were not subjected to the stresses of a large-scale European war until after their originator had returned to the post of his youth, and it will be the main aim of this paper to study how the reformed Admiralty tackled some of the problems of major warfare, and the way in which Sir James interpreted his powers and duties.
Britain and the Armenian Question, 1894–7
Authors: Douglas Roy
Published: June 2009

The Armenian crisis of the middle 1890s is sometimes regarded as a matter which is far removed from the main current of history. No doubt many Armenians were killed; no doubt it was the occasion (though hardly the cause) of Lord Rosebery's resignation from the Liberal leadership; but was it really a matter of great importance to anyone except the Armenians and possibly the British Liberals? It will be argued here that the manner in which that crisis was handled throws some useful light on the diplomatic and political processes of the period. It provides a baleful precedent for the much greater sufferings of the Armenians in later years; for the Jews in Hitler's Europe; and for many 'minorities' down to our own time. A powerful argument could be advanced for the view that the failure of the Powers to intervene on behalf of the Armenians was an essential link in the chain of events which led to the First World War.
Mediation by Obfuscation: the Resolution of the Marseille Crisis, October 1934 to May 1935
Authors: Kovrig Bennett
Published: June 2009

The year 1934 was notable not only for the intense diplomatic activity throughout Europe that followed Hitler's coming to power but also for a spate of political assassinations. Among the victims were Austrian chancellor Dollfuss and the Rumanian politician Ion Duca, not to speak of Kirov and those purged in Russia in December. Perhaps the most notable of these acts of terror occurred in Marseille on 9 October when King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, succumbed to the bullets of an assassin nicknamed Vlada the Chauffeur. The ensuing international crisis threw into sharp focus the evolving national interests and diplomatic styles of the European powers and serves as an illuminating case-study of a particular technique of conflict resolution.
Fresh Light on the Fall of Townshend
Authors: Black Jeremy
Published: June 2009

The resignation in May 1730 of Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1674–1738), as Secretary of State for the Northern Department, is an event that has attracted little attention. Aware of Sir Robert Walpole's determination to get rid of Townshend, scholars have tended to treat Walpole's success as inevitable. The major study of British political history in these years, that contained within Professor Plumb's valuable biography of Walpole, is disappointingly brief in its treatment of the crisis. This reflects the general tendency of the work to concentrate on domestic politics and to devote less attention to the interrelationship between them and foreign policy. As a result Plumb's treatment of Townshend's departure is less probing and comprehensive than most of his book. The failure of scholars to study the ministerial crisis of 1729–30is far from exceptional, for the years of Walpole's ascendancy have escaped the same degree of scrutiny by political historians that has marked the reigns of Anne and George III. A host of major figures lack scholarly biographies: George II; William Stanhope, who succeeded Townshend and was ennobled as Lord Harrington in 1730; the earl of Chesterfield, Townshend's principal supporter in the ministry in 1729–30; William Pulteney, the leader of the opposition Whigs; Lord Wilmington, the duke of Dorset and George Dodington, ministerial opponents of Walpole; and Queen Caroline.
The New Liberalism and the Rise of Labour, 1886–1906
Authors: Powell David
Published: June 2009

The political history of Liberalism in the twenty years after 1886 was dominated by two great concerns: the need to find a unifying platform for the party which would be capable of sustaining it as an effective political force in the post-Gladstonian era and the need to come to terms with the growing economic and political strength of organized Labour. It was axiomatic that the two concerns were closely connected and that ‘social reform’ was the crucial link between them. It seemed clear that a more active social policy would not only renew the reforming impetus of Liberalism, but would also enable the Liberals to retain working-class support and so help to prevent the formation of a separate Labour party. This was the assumption that spurred Liberals to a redefinition of their political creed and led to the formulation of a ‘new Liberalism’ committed to policies of state intervention and social reform of the kind implemented by Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George after 1906.3 However, while the New Liberalism may have acted as a cohering influence on the Liberal party (itself a moot point) and provided a firm intellectual justification for its policies, it proved less successful as a means of retaining Labour's undivided electoral support. With the formation, first of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, and then of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, there was set in train the formal organizational separation of the Liberal and Labour parties that was so drastically to affect the subsequent fortunes of Liberalism and so decisively to shape the pattern of modern British politics. The question that remains is whether this rift was the result of the tardiness with which the Liberals adopted their new policies, whether it was the product of other, quite separate factors, or whether in some way the nature of the New Liberalism itself may have contributed to the breach.
Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution
Authors: Schofield Thomas Philip
Published: June 2009

In attempting to explain the stability of eighteenth-century Britain, and in particular the maintenance of political, social and economic supremacy by the landed aristocracy, scholars have begun to pay attention to the role of ideology and opinion. They see this not merely as providing an explanation of the way things were, but justifying and reinforcing them. The dominant ideological interpretation of society had emerged from the political and constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, and in particular from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an interpretation which might be denominated ‘Whig’, and which faced its most serious challenge at the very end of the eighteenth century from the French revolution. Despite the more tangible threat of French arms, the ruling classes in Britain did not underestimate the danger to social order from the arguments advanced by adherents of the rights-of-man doctrine propagated by the revolutionaries. If, in reply to these views, the status quo could be shown not only to be necessary and inevitable, but also right and good, that is to say correspondent with the true nature of man, then the morality of the existing practices and institutions of civil society would be proven. The problem at its most fundamental level was ethical, and it was a problem which conservatives attempted to solve in a variety of ways.
American and British Diplomacy and the Bernadotte Mission
Authors: Gazit Mordechai
Published: June 2009

Almost forty years have passed since the UN mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, was assassinated in Jerusalem on 17 September, 1948 by the ‘Freedom Fighters of Israel’ (Lohamei Herut Yisrael. Hebrew acronym: LEHY), the smallest and most extreme of the three military organizations of the Yishuv (as the Jewish community in Palestine was called before the state of Israel came into being). The announcement made after the assassination was issued by ‘The Fatherland Front’ (Hazit ha-Moledet), a ‘front’ brought into being for the purpose by LEHY and which disappeared immediately afterwards. It declared that Bernadotte had been ‘an obvious agent of the British enemy’. Now that the British and American documents have been made available, this serious allegation can be examined, and as a result it can now safely be affirmed that the mediator acted in complete independence. He had no contact whatsover with British or American diplomacy over the political proposals that sealed his fate. These proposals he presented in his first Report on 28 June 1948.
French Rhineland Policy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919
Authors: McCrum Robert
Published: June 2009

The victory of the Allied powers in November 1918 gave the French a unique opportunity to establish a secure frontier on the Rhine. Throughout the peace conference that followed, the politicians, generals and intellectuals of the right who perceived this opportunity most clearly conducted a vigorous campaign to achieve France's ‘natural frontier.’ The separation of the Rhineland from Germany had three incontestable advantages for France. It would diminish Germany's superiority in population; it would establish a buffer zone between the two countries, and it would render impossible a German concentration of troops west of the Rhine itself. Such a ‘paix française’, however, would have been insensitive to the main consideration of post-war diplomacy: the creation of a lasting European peace that satisfied the conflicting foreign policies of the major allies. Chiefly to preserve the victorious alliance, Clemenceau, who at first had favoured the demands of the right, was forced to abandon the proposed separation and to accept a compromise. The French generals like Foch and Mangin who had worked to ‘deprussify’ the Rhineland did not realize their dream. The disputed territory, though occupied by a temporary, inter-allied force, remained German.
The United States and the Schuman Plan. a study in French diplomacy 1950–1952
Authors: Lovett A. W.
Published: June 2009

On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, offered to pool the coal and steel resources of France with those of its European neighbours. The proposal was directed principally at Western Germany. After a year of negotiations six western European states agreed to form the European Coal and Steel Community, an organization rightly seen as the beginning of the European Union. However significant at the time and subsequently, this creation resulted from a series of political bargains familiar to any practitioner of traditional politics. France was determined to limit the competitive advantages of German heavy industry to prevent future dominance by the Ruhr industrialists whose unsavoury past was also remembered. Jean Monnet, the head of the French delegation at the talks held in Paris, insisted on the ‘deconcentration’ of the steel and coal industries. Steel companies would be compelled to dispose of the colleries which they owned. To do this, however, Monnet had to invoke the help of the American high commissioner in Germany, John J. McCloy and his expert advisers. In terms of its origins the Coal and Steel Community can be considered the product of a bargain struck between the Federal Republic and America, not France and Western Germany. That the safeguards against vertical combinations and a single sales agency for coal proved unnecessary (and unenforceable) may partly explain the success of the first venture in European integration.
The 1937 census and the limits of Stalinist rule
Authors: Merridale Catherine
Published: June 2009

In January 1937 the government of the USSR conducted its first population census in eleven years. This article, which is based on the archives of the census organizations and on reports from some local offices for the registration of births, marriages and deaths, describes the campaign of data collection, the questions that were asked (including, for the first and last time, a question about the respondent's religion) and the response which people give to this personal contact with their rulers. The information gathered was exceptionally thorough and complete. Crucially, however, the census was entirely suppressed, and the officials responsible for organizing it promptly arrested and executed. The reasons for doing this – which largely centred on the sensitivity of evidence of high mortality during the famine of 1932–3 – are discussed, as are the potential implications of the suppression of such information. Finally, the article questions how complete any statistics about famine mortality in this period can be, and calls for a discussion of the broader questions of memory and loss which underlie the bare statistics of death.
The English Nobility and the Projected Settlement of 1647
Authors: Adamson J. S. A.
Published: June 2009

On 26 July 1647 Westminster, in the grip of plague and political crisis, exploded with rioting. With the connivance of leading Presbyterian politicians in parliament and the City, a throng of apprentices and demobilized soldiers besieged the two Houses, coercing the imprisoned members to accede to their demands. Many of the rioters had subscribed to an outlawed ‘Solemn Engagement’, calling for the restoration of the king: they demanded the reversal of parliament's declaration against this Engagement, and the return of the City's militia forces to its own strongly ‘Presbyterian’ Militia Committee. As the main body of rioters swarmed into the Court of Requests, through the Painted Chamber and assailed the doors of the house of lords, another smaller party led by one Brace, a grocer, ran down the Water Lane leading from the house to the river, to block this means of escape. Reminded by one of the rioters that ‘not at anie hand [was] this house to be forced’ Brace retorted ‘what they did, they were aduised by a Member of the house of Comons’.6 ‘Keepe them in, keepe them in thises three daies’, shouted their ringleader, the reformado captain, William Musgrave, ‘and if they will not grant your desires, cutt their throates’ ‘Through the barred doors of the Lords’ chamber came cries of ‘Traytors, put them out, hang their guts about their necks and many other like words’.
The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts its past, 1806–1829
Authors: Sack J. J.
Published: June 2009

On 27 January 1806, in a house of commons newly integrating the momentous events of Trafalgar, Nelson's death, and Napoleon's victory at Austerlitz, the obsequies of William Pitt commenced. Lord Lascelles proposed that the late prime minister be honoured as had been his father twenty-eight years before, with a public funeral. The motion eventually passed but the inter-party wrangle that it caused was unseemly. William Windham, who had served as Pitt's Secretary at War between 1794 and 1801, wondered why such unusual honours were proposed for Pitt, given both the precarious situation of the current war (so unlike the Great Commoner's contribution to British glory) and the fact that Edmund Burke's death in 1797 had elicited no such designs. ‘In every point of comparison that could be made,’ said Windham, ‘Mr Burke stood upon the same level with Mr Pitt, and I do not see the reason for the difference.’ In retrospect, it may appear odd that any leading politician thought Burke was entitled to a state funeral. He had been neither war leader nor prime minister, the usual recipients of public funerals. Few others in the political nation in 1797, whig or Pittite, shared Windham's judgement on this matter. That Windham thought the Pittitesshouldhave shared his judgement was the source of his bitterness in his speech to the House. If Burke's acknowledged enemies, the Foxite whigs, had opposed public honours for Burke, Windham would not have been surprised,

But that was not the case; it was not from them that the objection came, but from gentlemen on the other side of the house [Pittites], who took Mr Burke as the leader of their opinions, who cried him up to the skies, who founded themselves upon what he had done, but who were afraid, that if they consented to such honours, it would appear as if they approved of all the sentiments of that great man some of which were, perhaps, of too high a tone for them to relish.
Jules Cambon and Franco-German Détente, 1907–1914
Authors: Keiger John
Published: June 2009

Improved Franco-German relations are rarely associated with the years preceding the Great War or with the policies of Raymond Poincaré. Yet from 1907 to 1914 a persistent attempt was made to bring about détente between Paris and Berlin, which eventually led to the French president adopting a conciliatory attitude towards Germany, occasionally at the expense of relations with Russia. The instigator of this policy was the French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon. He believed that Franco-German détente could best serve the two axioms of French diplomacy since 1870: continental security and overseas expansion. Cambon considered the growth of German power in Europe and abroad to be both natural and inevitable and that France must come to terms with it.1 His policy involved ending the intransigence which he saw as having characterized French diplomacy, often with disastrous results, since 1870. He confessed in May 1908 that his ideas were fairly summarized in Clemenceau's remark to him: ‘On dit que vous avez dit que vous ne voulez aller ni à Ems ni à Faschoda.’2 These two incidents, the ‘Ems telegram’ and the Fashoda crisis, symbolized for him the recklessness and inflexibility of France's past diplomacy.
Greece, March 1941: The Politics of British Military Intervention
Authors: Lawlor Sheila
Published: June 2009

On 10 May 1940, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. The same day Churchill became prime minister. The coincidence of these events was symptomatic of the subsequent relationship between British politics and British strategy. Churchill's coming to power was identified with the start of the real war. His remaining there would largely depend on the way in which he appeared to execute it.
I. Sir John Fastolf's Lawsuit Over Titchwell 1448–55
Authors: Lewis P.S.
Published: June 2009

When Edmund Paston was at Clifford's Inn in the spring of 1445 he was firmly advised by his mother ‘to thynkk onis of the daie of yowre fadris Counseyle to lerne the lawe for he seyde manie tymis that ho so euer schuld dwelle at Paston schulde have nede to Conne defende hymselfe’. In this much-quoted remark as in other opinions her sound and sensible husband, judge William Paston, was far from being original. The advice was at least two centuries old, if not older; the popularity of law-books for their estate managers in the thirteenth century is evidence of how many landlords then took it to heart.1 A landowner's land was a permanent temptation for his neighbours; such legal knowledge in some degree was therefore vital to him or to his stewards for its defence. More violent action was restricted, if not wholly extinguished by twelfth-century legislation; but that legislation itself and later enactments provided new, more subtle and probably more certain ways of depriving an honest possessor of his property. And titles to land, complicated from the thirteenth century on by landowners’ increasing employment of the entail and the use, gave in the later Middle Ages ample scope for the dexterous at law. Lawsuits on three manors bought on dubious and complicated titles nearly doubled their cost for an over-eager Sir John Fastolf in the middle of the fifteenth century. As Agnes Paston told Edmund her son and as an anonymous versifier told other potential landowners, it was as well to beware.
III. The Payment And Mitigation Of A Star Chamber Fine
Authors: Batho G. R.
Published: June 2009

The severity of many of the fines imposed in the Court of Star Chamber in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has impressed historians as much as it impressed the members of the Long Parliament. For example, it has been calculated that out of the 240 cases brought in Star Chamber in the years 1625–41 where the sentence is known, fines of over £500 were imposed in eighty–five instances. Hudson, in his famous contemporary treatise on the Court, contended that this severity had markedly increased in the reign of Charles; ‘fines’, he wrote, ‘are new of late imposed secundum qualitatem delicti and not fitted to the estate of the person; so that they are rather in terrorempopuli than for the true end for the which they were intended, when fine and ransom was appointed£10,000 or more, under both Elizabeth and the early Stuarts.
II. ‘Statesmen in Disguise’: Reflexions on the History of the Neutrality of the Civil Service
Authors: Clark G. Kitson
Published: June 2009

Without question constitutional and democratic principles demand that the permanent officials of this country, even the most important and intelligent of them, must be content to deserve the proud title of servant. The Ministers of the Crown who are responsible to Parliament and enjoy their places because they have been chosen by the electorate, must, while they retain power, have an absolute control of the whole machinery of state, and that includes the unstinted service of the experts who alone can work that machinery. Of course a loyal servant has no need to be servile, nor in the right context dumb. The civil servant must give his counsel freely, and his criticism boldly; but the policy he must put into effect must obviously be that of the ruling political party and not his own. He must give order and practicability to the programme to which ministers are pledged, if that is at all possible. If he is in a position in the service for his opinions to affect his work then his opinions must be unknown to the public, and he must avoid public controversy and eschew party politics. Discreet, anonymous and uncommitted he must be free to serve equally effectively any party, to carry into action any policy, which the sovereign people in its wisdom has favoured at the polls.
IV. The Origins of the Birmingham Caucus
Authors: Tholfsen Trygve R.
Published: June 2009

In 1868 the Birmingham Liberal Association won the first of a series of dazzling victories in parliamentary and municipal elections. Contemporaries immediately recognized the presence of a new phenomenon in English politics: disciplined control of a mass electorate by a tightly organized party apparatus. At first glance the Liberal machine seemed un-English, and the Tories gleefully imported an American epithet to describe it. The traditional interpretation of the caucus, as set forth by Ostrogorski, followed contemporary opinion in emphasizing the novelty of the institution. In his view, ‘the organization of the electoral masses’ by the Liberal Association represented a sharp break with the past. He traced its origin to the minority clause of the Reform Act of 1867, which gave each Birmingham elector two votes to divide among the candidates for three seats, thus challenging the Liberals to develop an organization capable of circumventing the Act. After their success in the ‘vote as you are told’ election of 1868, the Liberal politicians, according to Ostrogorski, continued to use the caucus as a contrivance for manipulating an electorate that otherwise might have exercised independent judgment. This interpretation remains of considerable value, particularly in its treatment of the oligarchic implications of modern democracy. Nevertheless, Ostrogorski’s analysis tends to be misleading and one-sided. The Liberal politicians, like the priests in Voltaire’s account of the history of religion, are depicted as consciously constructing an institution ex nihilo to meet their own needs and purposes. Ostrogorski attributes too much to calculation and too little to the historical process that created the materials out of which the caucus was built and the foundations on which it rested.
Bentham versus Pitt: Jeremy Bentham and British Foreign Policy 1789
Authors: Conway Stephen
Published: June 2009

The successes and failures of British foreign policy from the end of the American war of independence until the outbreak of the conflict with revolutionary France will be familiar, at least in outline, to many students of late-eighteenth-century history. In 1783 Britain was widely regarded as having been reduced to the status of a second-rank power. British ministers, and especially Pitt the Younger and his first foreign secretary, the marquess of Carmarthen, sought a European alliance to end their country's isolation and vulnerability. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, the product of French rather than British pressure, was of little help in this respect, as it never developed beyond a limited trade agreement. Negotiations for similar reciprocal commercial concessions with other powers all proved fruitless. In 1787 and 1788, however, political and military arrangements were concluded with the Dutch and the Prussians after Prussian troops – with British encouragement and support – had intervened in the United Provinces to secure the position of the house of Orange and to crush the pro-French ‘Patriot’ party. Fortified by this new British – Prussian – Dutch connexion, or Triple Alliance as it was called, Pitt's government was able to exert considerable influence in Europe and farther afield. In 1788, when the Swedes attacked Russia, which was already at war with the Turks, Denmark, in accordance with its treaty obligations to Russia, invaded Sweden. The British and Prussians threatened the Danes and forced them to withdraw. A few months later, in April 1789, renewed Anglo-Prussian pressure compelled Denmark to maintain a strict neutrality in the continuing Russo-Swedish conflict. In 1790 the British were just as successful in a confrontation with Spain over the Nootka Sound in North America. Only when the government backed down during the dispute with Russia over possession of the Turkish fortress of Ochakov on the Black Sea coast, were the limits of British power fully exposed.
Treasury Control, the Ten Year Rule and British Service Policies, 1919–1924
Authors: Ferris John
Published: June 2009

There is one major gap in the historiography of British strategic policy during the interwar years. Historians have not examined that policy of the 1920s as if it was a coherent topic in its own right. Although writers like Brian Bond, James Neidpath, Stephen Roskill and Malcolm Smith have elucidated aspects of that matter, such as the development of the Singapore base or of the policies of the fighting services, they have still treated each such issue and department in isolation from the rest. Even those scholars like Correlli Barnett and N. H. Gibbs who have sought to examine strategic policy in the interwar years as a whole, have primarily seen the strategic decisions of the 1920s not as an autonomous historical subject but rather as a prelude to Britain's position in the 1930s. Consequently, historians have made these decisions seem inexplicable and unconnected, by removing them from the context of their time and of strategic policy. This approach has led writers to misconstrue the evolution of strategic policy during the 1920s. They have done so because of their assumptions about that issue. They have not recognized these assumptions as being such, but have treated them instead as a bedrock of self-evident fact. Yet when these assumptions are examined, they can be demonstrated to be false.
1. British Governments and Rebellion at Sea
Authors: Anderson Olive
Published: June 2009

Rebels against British governments could always maintain themselves far more easily at sea than on land; a guerre de course was indeed their natural resource. They could use as bases the small islands so conveniently situated athwart British trade routes in the Channel and the Irish and North seas, or the nearby ports of foreign powers; even more important, the chances of profit which a trade war held out invariably won them support not only from numbers of English seamen (especially Irish and Channel ports men), but from the cosmopolitan armateurs and floating riff-raff of the ports of France and the Low Countries as well. Yet because merchant support was vital to domestic stability and British seamen were precious, no de facto government could postpone for long a vigorous attempt to clear the seas of rebel ships.
The King in Parlement: The Problem of theLit De Justicein Sixteenth-Century France
Authors: Holt Mack P.
Published: June 2009

‘You ask me what aLit de justiceis? I will tell you!’ Thus exclaimed Louis-Adrien Le Paige, an eighteenth-centuryparlementairewho was excoriating the current spectacle of the king's appearance in person in the Grand-Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. Denied their ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation in important affairs of state, which in their view meant an active or participatory role in the legislative process, magistrates like Le Paige felt coerced in 1756 into the passive role of registering policies presented to them asfaits accomplis. And thus also opens Professor Sarah Hanley's penetrating and revisionist study of this complex ceremony where monarch and magistrates met together in the legislative arena: thelit de justice. In a tour de force of painstaking scholarship Professor Hanley has convincingly proved that this ceremony, in which the king personally appeared in Parlement and sat on a specially decorated ‘seat of justice’, had evolved out of legend and myth. Thelit de justicedid not, as generations ofparlementaireslike Le Paige had claimed, emerge in the middle ages shortly after the creation of the court itself in the late thirteenth century. As Professor Hanley shows, the first such ceremony did not occur until much later, in the reign of Francis I in 1527. More importantly, she demonstrates that at its inception thelit de justicewas not associated in any way with the adversarial scene depicted by Le Paige in 1756, with the king forcing his will on a recalcitrant court by making a personal appearance in the Grand-Chambre in order to force the registration of unpopular legislation.
The King, the People and the House of Commons: The Problem of Early Jacobean Purveyance
Authors: Lindquist Eric N.
Published: June 2009

For a brief time at the beginning of James I's reign purveyance appeared as the greatest grievance of the commonwealth, troubling the first two sessions of his first parliament. So much has long been known, but only recently has it been revealed how far the commons thought of going. The bills read in the house in 1604 and 1606, almost certainly identical or nearly so, did not look merely to remedy the abuses of purveyors, but to abolish purveyance itself – the king's right to be served provisions and carriage at prices below those current in the markets – which the house discovered was explicitly prohibited by numerous medieval statutes. The commons' refusal in the two sessions to buy the king out of his prerogative with a ‘composition’ was not then irresponsible, as one historian has suggested. The house could not readily agree to purchase what it had learned the king had no right to sell. The radical challenge to the king's prerogative embodied in the commons' bill, Dr Croft has recently argued, doomed the composition proposed by James's ministers. Instead, the house pursued its claims with ‘remarkable tenacity’, especially in 1606, when it passed the bill twice.
Peel and the Conservative Party: the Sugar Crisis of 1844 Reconsidered
Authors: Fisher D. R.
Published: June 2009

The brief ministerial crisis of June 1844, precipitated by the defeat in the House of Commons of the government's proposals for the temporary adjustment of the duties on imported sugar, and resolved when Sir Robert Peel secured from the House what amounted to a reversal of the decision, has been scrutinized by two historians in recent years. In his earlier work, Dr Stewart cites with approval contemporary observations to the effect that Peel's authority was severely shaken by the affair, and remarks that ‘by 1844 the Tory, nationalist wing of Peel's party was beginning to unite in resistance to the progressive tendency of Peel's government. In 1844 they gave Peel a warning of what they might do.’ His second assessment is more emphatic. He interprets Conservative disaffection on the sugar issue, and on the factory bill three months earlier, as the ‘first challenge to Peel's leadership’, and argues that it revealed that ‘Peel's hold over a large section of his party was at an end, destroyed by his own methods’.
Disraeli's imperialism, 1866–1868: a question of timing
Authors: Harcourt Freda
Published: June 2009

Important landmarks, especially on the well-trodden ground of British history, sometimes appear to be so precisely delineated that they leave little room for re-interpretation. Yet if familiar episodes are looked at from perspectives which pose new questions and call for different evidence the result may well be unexpectedly illuminating. The making of the Second Reform Act is a good example. Though the subject of close scholarly investigation in terms of British parliamentary politics, it has not hitherto been viewed as only one of many closely linked domestic and foreign pressures which bore upon the British polity between 1866 and 1868 and which together exercised a decisive influence upon it. Reform, public order, economic recession, integration of the classes, concern about defence, and the challenge to Britain's international standing, were all components of the same crisis, and whether by chance or ingenuity it was the same power groups which had to handle them within the confines of time and circumstance.
Politics and power: the Triumph of Jacobinism in Strasbourg, 1791–1793
Authors: Gough Hugh
Published: June 2009

One of the recurrent challenges to the historian of the French Revolution is that of interpreting the transition from the liberalism of its early years to the centralized dictatorship of the Terror. Why did the constitution of 1791, that remarkable legislative achievement which stood for so long as a model to nineteenth-century liberal reformers, collapse within a year of its enactment? How did the individual and political liberties guaranteed by that constitution become submerged so rapidly under the flood of repressive legislation during the Year II? What made the impressive façade of theannus mirabilisof 1790 crumble into political dissension from the summer of 1791 onwards, revealing the stark realities of religious conflict, war, insurrection and civil strife? Whether one regards this transition as the unfortunate consequence of a succession of political accidents or as the inevitable result of deeply rooted social conflict, the role of Jacobinism in the process is fundamental, for it provided both the personnel and the ideology that was to dominate political life throughout the Terror. As Michelet was one of the first to point out, Jacobinism underwent several transformations during the five years of its existence as a formal political movement, moving decisively to the left after the secession of the Feuillants in July 1791 and again with the expulsion of the leading Girondins in the following autumn, until it reached its final and most characteristic stage only at the height of the Terror, during Year II.