bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
William Pitt and the Generals: Three Case Studies in the Seven Years‘ War
Authors: Hackmann W. Kent
Published: November 2007

British historians agree that from 1756 to 1761 William Pitt was the driving force behind England's victories in the Seven Years' War. Historians are divided, however, in their assessment of Pitt's relations with his generals. Basil Williams concisely stated one position when he linked success with Pitt's “wise choice of commanders on land and sea.” Julian S. Corbett best represents the opposite opinion. “It is commonplace,” he observed, “to credit him [Pitt] with a remarkable talent for choosing commanders. Yet surely no great War Minister ever appointed so many bad ones.”

The lines for debate are clear, and the question is vital for a general interpretation of Pitt's career and England's role in the war. Surprisingly, modern students of the elder Pitt have uncritically followed the opinion represented by Williams, and they have disregarded Eric McDermott's call in 1955 for a fresh examination of the “Great Commoner” and civil-military relations during the war. This essay deals with the question by telling the story of three English military operations on the French coast in 1757 and 1758. They are important in themselves for what they reveal about military planning and execution. More important, the story supports Corbett's conclusion by shedding light on the relationship between Pitt in London and the commanders in the field.

Pitt came to power when the country's military fortunes were at their lowest point. General Braddock's defeat in western Pennsylvania and the loss of Minorca, the Royal Navy's best base in the Mediterranean, punctuated the pre-war hostilities with France. At home, the armed services were undermanned, and abroad the search for allies left England with Prussia to face the combined forces of France, Austria and Russia.
L. T. Hobhouse as a Theoretical Sociologist
Authors: Mariz George
Published: November 2007

A glance at recent publications on the history of theoretical sociology in Europe would reveal that no one has yet attempted to write a full scale history of the early phases of that movement in Britain. There is certainly nothing that compares with Raymond Aron'sMain Currents in Sociological Thoughtfor British sociology. Aron's study, in fact, contains only scattered references to British thinkers and attaches little significance to them. Nor does this absence of Britishers result from some slight on Aron's part. While British sociology during the formative years of the discipline, roughly 1850-1930, did make some notable advances in its empirical branches, it produced no individual worthy to stand with theorists like Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto or Emil Durkheim.

The reasons for this shortcoming on the British part are numerous and diverse. First, British thinking generally was concerned with more practical problems and not with theoretical matters and thus, automatically favored less abstract forms of social science. Additionally, those few British thinkers interested in problems of theory generally failed to recognize the significance of the advances of Continental mental philosophers and psychologists whose work has done so much to enrich twentieth century social theory. Yet there is a deeper and more subtle set of reasons interconnected with those aforementioned for the relative stasis of British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Recent Historical Writings on Restoration England
Authors: Sachse William L.
Published: November 2007

In setting forth these impressions of what has been done in recent years by historians of Restoration England (a period I take to cover the years 1660-1689), it seems convenient to review activity since 1960. Robert Walcott, some ten years ago, covered the period 1939-1959 (presumably using the publication date of Grose's bibliography as his starting point). The past few years have seen the publication of two bibliographies relating to the period: the revised Davies, by Mary Keeler, covering the entire Stuart era, and my own bibliographical handbook, dealing only with the reigns of Charles II and James II. Keeler's revision includes very little published after 1961. My own compilation involved a systematic appraisal to 1969, and therefore serves as the principal basis for the following remarks. The period 1660-1689 is a relatively short one, as bibliographies go; a good many of the works touched upon here have a somewhat wider scope, but in all cases they seem to make important contributions to Restoration history.

In 1960 Cecily Wedgwood could still note that the Restoration era was a much emptier field, at least as far as political history is concerned, than the early Stuart period. But that is by no means so true today. Taking up various categories in myRestoration England, I find that in the fields of political and constitutional history just over half the entries refer to works published since 1960. Next in popularity come Science and Technology, and Intellectual History, each with about a quarter of the entries.
The Reform of the Scottish Sheriffdoms in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Whetstone Ann E.
Published: November 2007

The main feature which distinguishes Scottish local government from English local government in the later eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century is the presence there of professional men—the sheriffs. The sheriff, and later the sheriff-substitute, was the key to the legal and administrative system in the Scottish countries. He had no English equivalent. Essentially he was a representative of the central government who administered justice at the local level. After the reforms of 1748 the sheriff was a bureaucrat in the finest sense—highly trained and efficient. The substitute acquired strict standards more slowly, but by 1830 he too had to meet high standards in training and performance.

Before the mid-eighteenth century, the sheriff had hardly been a progressive figure. Indeed, the Scottish sheriff typified the backward state of Scottish local government, a state which had been little affected by the Act of Union. In 1700 Scotland lacked a uniform system of justice. Independent franchise courts and hereditary rights to judicial offices, including that of sheriff, were common throughout the Lowlands. They were relatively rare in the Highlands, because the king's justice had never made sufficient headway to make possible or necessary these particular legal perversions.
Little Tin Gods: The District Officer in British East Africa
Authors: Thomason Michael
Published: November 2007

They were unlikely choices for revolutionaries and hardly the haughty autocrats the phrase “Little Tin Gods” conjures up. Yet many East African district officers felt it their duty to change the lives of the Africans they ruled, and against great odds they did. Sent out by their superiors in London and Nairobi as policemen and tax collectors, they saw themselves as secular missionaries for a superior culture. Working in the decade before the catastrophic first world war, they were the last generation of Europeans who easily believed their own superiority. Under pressure to produce revenue many district commissioners fostered economic development as a first step in reforming African society. They wished to develop an exchange economy based upon the fruits of a settled and productive peasantry working on its own land. They believed the Africans would adopt the basic values of hard work and even self-reliance, making an Edwardian revolution. If their assumptions about social change, economics, or even civilization itself seem unsophisticated, it is because they were amateurs. They had few resources beyond their own confidence and sense of mission. They began a revolution, but it was not the one they intended for they failed to retrieve colonial Kenya from the clutches of a handful of white settlers. Their vision of peaceful prosperity for the Africans was ultimately denied, and the hopes they raised became murderous frustrations. They offered Kenya an alternative course which imperialism could not accept.

Kenya's first district officers came from diverse backgrounds, but most shared the middle class values they proposed for the Africans.
Fenians and Farmers: The Merger of the Home-Rule and Owner-Occupancy Movements in Ireland, 1850-1915
Authors: Huttman John P.
Published: November 2007

Irish political activity diminished in the early 1850s from previously more intensive levels. The tenant-right movement, established to secure economic justice for tenant farmers whose numbers dominated the ranks of Irish cultivators, continued to elicit a sympathetic response. But by the middle of the nineteeth century, it had deteriorated to a shadow of its former strength. The enthusiasm of the rural Irish for political causes had seemingly been drained by the traumatic experience of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. The potato blight, with the failure of a crop upon which many were heavily dependent, resulted in the death of over a half million persons. The flow of emigrants accelerated in the famine and immediate post-famine period. The population of Ireland was reduced from over eight million in 1841 to about six and one-half million in 1851. Landlords engaged in widespread tenant eviction during the famine episode. The established trend of the shift of agricultural land from crop to livestock production was accelerated.

Rural assistance programmes initiated in the famine and immediate post-famine years were primarily intended to benefit landlords and large farm operators with measures for soil improvement and drainage control. Recovery from the famine was slow and tortuous: the real value of agricultural output was still ten percent lower in the early 1860s than in the early 1850s. The reduction of the value of crop output by about one-third was largely compensated by the rise of value of livestock output. It proved to be a hostile environment for those tenant farmers surviving the famine. The tenant farmers — all but three percent of the total number of farm operators — were defeated and submissive. They offered slight resistance to measures introduced for the consolidation of estates and for the transfer of title from indebted to more commercially oriented owners.
James VII's Forfeiture of the Scottish Throne
Authors: Barnes Robert P.
Published: November 2007

The perspective of time has allowed most British historians to declare the English phase of the British Revolution of 1688-1689 “glorious” whereas the Scottish developments largely have been ignored as inconsequential. Although Scotland was included in Macaulay's History of England, for the past century it has been mentioned only briefly in historical treatments of the Revolution. Yet the Scottish Convention Parliament of 1689 not only followed and fulfilled the English Parliament's revolutionary initiative, but in an independent process paved the way for a more fundamental, uncompromising, and far-reaching constitutional settlement.

Lacking foresight to know that their best efforts would be amalgamated in the Union of 1707, Scottish politicians in 1689 forged ahead with a radical revolution that terminated Stuart absolutism and provided a fleeting chance for national independence under a constitutional monarchy. The event which opened the way for a revolutionary constitutional settlement was the forfeiture of the throne by James II & VII and the subsequent conditional offering of the same to William and Mary by the Scottish Estates in the spring of 1689.

In January 1689 following the final flight of James VII from Britain and the simultaneous collapse of his Scottish administration, the leaders of the Scottish aristocracy assembled at Whitehall and temporarily placed the government of their realm in the hands of Prince William of Orange pending a Convention Parliament.
Cromwell, Cranmer and Lord Lisle: A Study in the Politics of Reform
Authors: Slavin Arthur J.
Published: November 2007

When Henry VIII raised Thomas Cromwell to the earldom of Essex, most observors were both dazzled by the ceremony and deceived as to its significance. The French ambassador Marillac had taken the measure of events, however. He had speculated that Cromwell would lose authority in religious matters, while perhaps retaining it in worldly affairs. Those whom Cromwell had put in the shade reserved “une bonne pensée” for him, Marillac said. And Cromwell's close ties to religious radicals (Friar Barnes and the Calais Sacramentarians) provided weapons to his enemies. Norfolk and his conservative friends feared further reformation might provide occasions for new waves of rebellion in a country already under diverse threats at home and abroad. They would not miss their chance to cast down the upstart.

Modern historians have dismissed Marillac's chief point, that Cromwell would fall because he had used his powers to make a ‘party’ in the State. Foxe, Hall and Burnet had seen the king's minister in that light. Many of Cromwell's contemporaries held such views. But the weight of Professor Elton's opinion has lain heavily on the subject. He dismissed Marillac as little more than an ill-in-formed gossip. Then, turning to the evidence of the Act of Attainder passed against Cromwell, the Cambridge wizard treated it with equal severity. Allegations that Cromwell had illegally retained heretical men, in order to have a force with which to defend error with sword in hand, were obviously contrived.
Herman Merivale and the Native Question, 1837–1861
Authors: McNab David
Published: November 2007

One of the most important consequences of the granting of colonial self-government in the British Empire in the early and mid-Victorian period was that it created complex problems for the Colonial Office concerning the future of native populations. In the nineteenth century this imperial dilemma was termed the “native question.” Natives were regarded as a lower class, like the Irish or the poor in Britain, and British liberals sought to better the material condition of these people by means of the panaceas of education and religion. Their object was humanitarian and their methods were usually paternalistic. Herman Merivale, in his role as a commentator on the native question, was both naive and at times Utopian in his attempts to find a solution. As an imperial administrator he was involved in the ineffectual attempts to implement the schemes of “amalgamation” (gradual union leading to assimilation) and “insulation” (reservations). British native policies failed largely because of resistance by native peoples and the weaknesses of imperial administration rather than British racial attitudes.

For Merivale “race” was a cultural idea derived from early nineteenth century ethnography, not a pseudo-scientific rationale which determined that native peoples were physically and, therefore, intellectually and materially inferior. Until the 1860's, at least, his ideas on this subject were not very different from those of his British contemporaries and were derived from a wide variety of written sources rather than direct observation.
The Chartist Convention of 1839
Authors: Kemnitz Thomas Milton
Published: November 2007

This article has two purposes: to present some of the most basic facts about the Chartist Convention in 1839, and to offer a new structure for interpreting the Convention.

It is necessary to set forth the basic facts because historians have not bothered very much about them. The factual poverty of the historiography of the national Chartist movement was demonstrated recently by the publication of J. T. Ward'sChartism. Although the Convention of 1839 played a crucial role in the movement, Ward cannot tell his readers precisely who attended it or when it met. He states that fifty-four delegates attended it (p. 113), but in fact, seventy-one delegates attended the Convention. He incorrectly dates the adjournment for the simultanous meetings as 16 May (p. 123), and states that the Convention dissolved on 6 September (p. 133) when it met last on 14 September. Another sort of error in Ward's account involves the attendance of delegates. He asserts that Fletcher retired to Bury in March (p. 117), but Fletcher attended the Convention through July and sat in London on the Council in early August. He asserts Joseph Wood “left on 18 April” (p. 118); but no evidence exists that Wood attended the Convention after 18 February, and the evidence is overwhelming that he was not present at any time after 21 February. Ward says that Vincent and M'Douall were arrested in April (p. 121); in fact, Vincent was arrested just past midnight on the morning of 8 May, and M'Douall was taken by the authorities on 8 June. Ward asserts that Rider “led the summer resignations” (p. 125); he resigned on 2 May. Yet another source of error involves the sequence of events in localities as it affected the Convention and the delegates. Ward states that Richardson resigned to be replaced by Christopher Dean (p. 125); Dean was elected on 4 May, and Richardson resigned on 5 July. This dreary catalogue could be extended, but the point is clear.
The Role of Local Authorities in the Provincial Hunger Riots of 1766
Authors: Shelton Walter J.
Published: November 2007

The hunger riots which spread across most of southern England in the summer and autumn of 1766 were the most extensive rural disorders in a century when food riots became chronic. More serious in their threat to the social order than the violent protests against the high cost of “necessaries” and the new Militia Act in 1756-57, the disturbances of 1766 placed a heavy strain upon the forces of order. They foreshadowed the more serious agrarian riots of the next century.

While the War Office in September, 1766 moved its detachments across the countryside in a vain effort to parry the rapidly-shifting threats from militant labourers, colliers, tinners, weavers, and others of the provincial dispossessed, the rioters becamer bolder and seized control of large tracts of the countryside almost in the manner of an occupying army. As the crisis developed, demands for military protection from market towns and isolated country estates poured into the War Office. By late September the pattern of events had unfolded to the point where Lord Barrington, the Secretary-at-War, apprehended a threat of general insurrection. Striving to mobilise his limited resources, he ordered the commanders of both active troops and “invalides” to assist the civil magistrates “upon requisition,” while at the same time he urged the leaders of rural society, the aristocracy and the gentry to abandon their lethargy and use initiative in arming their servants to suppress less serious disturbances.
W. H. Auden in the 1930's: The Problem of Individual Commitment to Political Action
Authors: Bone Christopher
Published: November 2007

In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was perhaps to be expected that the main theme in literature among younger writers and poets particularly would be the social, political, and economic malaise of the time. Indeed, it was the delineation and analysis of this malaise and its relationship to individual life that set the tone of the so-called thirties poetry in Britain and which provided the focal point of W. H. Auden, the most distinguished and versatile English poet of the 1930's. Auden's work in the thirties was characterized by persistent intellectual effort and endurance. For as his contemporary John Lehmann pointed out, W. H. Auden was “the spiritual physician of his generation.” And he was the spiritual physician because more than any other prestigious English litterateur of the interwar years, Auden sought to resolve what seemed to be the most critical problem of the time: how the individual might take effective political action without losing his moral integrity. Or as Auden put the problem as early as 1930:

Here am I, Here are you,

But what does it mean

And what are we going to do?

I should like, therefore, to examine two of W. H. Auden's works which most directly confront the problem of individual commitment to collective political action: “Spain,” and Journey to a War.

The famous poem “Spain,” written in April 1937 and published in May of that year, seemed to announce that at last Auden offered unequivocal endorsement of politicial action. The poem further develops a theme set forth in his celebrated Look Stranger (1935) — the moral responsibility of carefully considered choice and action. The Spanish Civil War, to Auden, is the clear opportunity of an individual to make a decision and to act. A person could either do nothing, which in the face of the Fascist threat is virtually to commit moral suicide, or he could act in unison with other individuals against Fascism. In Auden's view, not only does the Spanish Civil War represent a crisis situation in the history of his generation, it represents also a pivotal point in the intellectual history of the Western World. Accordingly Auden places himself and his generation in a profoundly meaningful historical context. The first stanzas of the poem summarize the ingredients of the Weltanschauung which culminated in twentieth-century liberalism, with its political manifestation in Western parliamentary democracy. The poet also sketches the history of the application of science to conquer the natural world and the gradual victory of scientific method over the ages in which religious faith explained the whole of the world as but a symbol of a transcendental order.
Growing Old in Early Stuart England
Authors: Smith Steven R.
Published: November 2007

It is difficult to generalize about how people at any point in time view the process of growing old and the aged themselves. Attitudes towards old people have perhaps always been ambiguous and are probably ambiguous in western societies today. In seventeenth-century England, which in so many ways combined tradition and modernity, the ambivalent attitude towards the elderly included both traditional and modern aspects in three ways. First, as with traditional societies, early modern Englishmen looked upon old age as simply another stage in life, one of the seven through which all persons must pass; at the same time, old age was seen as something entirely different, a reversal of all previous stages. The latter view, which sociologists have labeled the “implicit” view, sees life as a constant process of expansion and growth until one reaches old age when the process is halted and reversed. Secondly, as in other traditional societies, old age was seen as a period of great dignity and wisdom, with the elderly deserving the respect and admiration of all other persons. Alongside this view in seventeenth-century England, old age was thought of as a time of folly and old people were described in undesirable terms. Thirdly, there were two ways of looking at death and its nearness: the traditional Christian view, held by many seventeenth-century theologians, was that death was entirely in God's hands and was a relief from the suffering of earthly life. The more modern view, held by others in the seventeenth-century, was that death was postponable by sensible precautions or by the science of medicine. Drawing on the literature of the age, this article will attempt to show old age in all of these various ways and point out the ambiguities.
The Testimony of Nature: Boyle, Hooke and Experimental Philosophy
Authors: Kargon Robert H.
Published: November 2007

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”

Francis Bacon,The Great Instauration

The first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”

Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.
The ‘Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson's Bay’: A Study of the Founding Members of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1665–1670
Authors: Gough Barry M.
Published: November 2007

In this year of the tercentenary of the incorporation of the Hudson's Bay Company it is appropriate to examine the founding membership of what may still be called “The Great Company.” It is surprising that the literature which chronicles the early adventures of the Company in the northern reaches of Canada has largely neglected a close scrutiny of the founders. The purpose of this article is to examine the early partnership, note the walks of life and social groups from which the adventurers came, and identfy those who formed the nucleus of leadership in planning and executing the endeavors for which the Hudson's Bay Company became renowned.

In general, the men who established the Hudson's Bay Company were representative of the era of extensive oversea expansion that characterized Restoration England. They were essentially promoters and imperialists. Yet they were not the first of their kind, for in the thirteenth century merchants had formed regulated organizations for prosecuting the cloth trade. Nor did they ever possess the financial power or parliamentary lobby of the East India Company. Nonetheless, their interest in the fur trade, in a Northwest passage and in general scientific inquiry prompted these men to lay the basis of a firm that by the height of its influence in the early 1840 was engaged in business throughout most of British North America as well as on the Pacific slope south to San Francisco Bay, in the Pacific islands, and in Canton. Today this organization remains the oldest merchant trading company in the world and the oldest business firm on the North American continent.
Liberal Women's Organizations and the War Against the Boers, 1899-1902
Authors: Hirshfield Claire
Published: November 2007

In October of 1899 war broke out between Great Britain and the Transvaal Republic following a Boer attack upon Natal and Cape Colony. Thus opened what was destined to be the most melancholy chapter in imperial history.1 Although Britain ultimately achieved military victory, the circumstances surrounding the start of the war and the methods by which it was fought provoked serious domestic division and crisis, especially within the opposition Liberal party.

Because of the Boers' apparent aggression against British territory in South Africa, the majority of Britons, irrespective of social class, responded with an unprecedented display of outraged patriotism and national pride. The war was characterized by no less a critic than Keir Hardie as “the most popular ever waged in England.” “Mobs of workingmen”, he complained, “nightly invade and smash up public meetings held in the interests of peace and assault the speakers with stones.”

From the start, however, a small minority, derisively called pro-Boers, dissented from the national consensus, attacking Unionist policies and motives, and waging one of the most sustained anti-war campaigns in modern history. Though the movement encompassed socialists, trade unionists, clergymen, journalists, and a variety of intellectuals, at its core was a bloc of parliamentary Radicals and Lib-Labs which consistently espoused a position independent of the official Opposition. Variously denouncing the war as unwise, unnecessary, and unjust, the Radical bloc enunciated views during the war years which strikingly foreshadowed the anti-imperial rhetoric of a more modern era.
Bulstrode Whitelocke and Early Interregnum Chancery Reform
Authors: Busch Allan J.
Published: November 2007

Reform of the law and the courts, especially the Court of Chancery, has been one of the most active areas of interest among historians concerned with the Interregnum period of English history. However, the authors on law reform have relied primarily upon the plethora of pamphlet literature and other printed materials which have led them to conclude that the legal profession obstructed reform of the law to protect its vested interests in offices and fees. Bulstrode Whitelocke, one of the lords commissioners of the great seal (the Chancery judges of the Interregnum) from 1649 to 1655, has long served historians as an example of the legal profession's refusal to assist or to cooperate in any meaningful reformation of the law or equity. Recently, Donald Veall, David Underdown, and Blair Worden have again laid the failure of reform at the door of the lawyers and judges who sat in the Rump, on commissions of law reform, and in the Protectorate parliaments. They have also assigned to Whitelocke a major responsibility for the defeat of law reform in the Rump, both before and after the Hale Commission's comprehensive plan of reform in January 1653, and in the first Protectorate Parliament in 1654. They believe, despite Whitelock's fervor for professional standards and his mild reforming tendencies, that he represented the major hurdle for any successful reform in law or equity.
Churchill, Macmillan, and the Reactivation of “Force X”
Authors: Zebel Sydney H.
Published: November 2007

Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister who was Resident Minister and political adviser at Algiers during 1943, devotes a chapter in his autobiographical volume dealing with World War II to the reactivation of the French naval squadron known as “Force X.” Although brief, impressionistic and lacking balance (students would be better advised to consult Sir Llewellyn Woodward's scholarly treatment), his account makes it evident that he had serious differences with Winston Churchill. The explanation he offers is that the Prime Minister resented his warning against the use of “bullying tactics.” Churchill, in his great war history, devotes only a brief paragraph to this curious episode and omits any reference to the important part Macmillan played. But a recent investigation of unpublished correspondence in the Prime Minister's Operational Papers, and of other pertinent materials, casts considerable light on the nature of their disagreement. These sources also provide valuable insights into the Force X problem generally, notably with respect to its linkage by Macmillan with the larger and much more important issue of French political unity. Actually minor in global war perspective, the Force X problem became a symbol of British difficulties in dealing with a defeated and divided France.

Force X was the French eastern Mediterranean squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral René Godfroy, which was blocked in the port of Alexandria by a more powerful British fleet at the time of the Franco-German armistice in June, 1940. It consisted of one battleship, four cruisers, three destroyers, a half-dozen torpedo boats, and one submarine. The Force X commander, although claiming to be an Anglophile, believed that the French government had no option at that critical juncture but to abandon its ally and to accept Hitler's cease-fire terms.
The National Council of Labour, 1921–1946
Authors: Brookshire Jerry H.
Published: November 2007

The National Council of Labour attempted to coordinate the policies and actions of the Trades Union Congress and Labour party. It had a checkered history and eventually failed. Its existence, however, demonstrated that the leadership of the Trades Union Congress and Labour party were grappling with questions which have constantly confronted modern British labor, especially the ever-present controversy over the TUC and party relationship, as well as whether a unified labor movement is possible or even desirable, or whether the TUC and labour party appropriately represent components within such a movement. If the last is true, do both institutions share fundamental concepts, and can they develop common tactics or approaches in furthering them? Are those “two wings” mutually dependent? Can the party aid the TUC in achieving its political goals? If the concerns of the TUC and party differ, can they or should they be reconciled? Should the TUC-party relationship remain the same whether the party is in government or in opposition?

The National Council of Labour consisted of representatives from the TUC's General Council, the Labour party's National Executive Committee (NEC), and the parliamentary Labour party's Executive Committee (PLP executive). Originally created in 1921 as the National Joint Council, it was reconstituted in 1930 and again in 1931-32, renamed the National Council of Labour in 1934, and began declining in 1940 to impotence by 1946. It was an extra-parliamentary, extra-party body designed to enhance cooperation and coherence within the labor movement.
The Civil War Sheriff: His Person and Office
Authors: Mather Jean
Published: November 2007

The rise and fall of the office of sheriff is a frequent theme in English administrative history. In medieval times sheriffs were the principal representatives of the king in the local community and bore the king's authority and acted in his name. Their courts entertained a wide variety of criminal and civil proceedings. By Tudor times such powers and authority were things of the past. Edward IV had effectively ended the sheriff's power by removing all indictments before the sheriff in his tourn to the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace for trial. The sheriff's judicial powers passed to the justices of the peace and his military powers to the deputy lieutenants. What powers did remain were exercised under the supervision of the magistrates both in and out of formal sessions. When James I came to the throne in 1603, the once powerful sheriff presided at elections, distrained and sold goods for the payment of fines, summoned juries, hanged criminals, and carried out other miscellaneous tasks. For most gentlemen of England a year's tenure as sheriff was an expensive inconvenience.

By 1640, however, the sheriff was once again a public figure of some consequence. The first two Stuarts, especially Charles I, had turned to the sheriff to execute many of their financial and administrative programs. Three times James I ordered sheriffs to collect extra benevolences. It seemed to many that Charles I had used the office for inappropriate political purposes. A sheriff had to be resident in his county throughout his term of office so he could not serve in parliament. In 1625 Thomas Wentworth was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire, and the even more troublesome Edward Coke was appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire. Two years later Walter Long, M.P. was appointed sheriff of Wiltshire, an affront to the electors of Bath who had recently returned him to the House of Commons. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, these events were remembered with considerable bitterness; and the Grand Remonstrance noted “the usual course of pricking sheriffs [was] not observed, but many times sheriffs made in an extraordinary way, sometimes as a punishment and a charge unto them, sometimes such were pricked out as would be instruments to execute whatever they would have done.”
John Bunyan and the Fifth Monarchists
Authors: Greaves Richard L.
Published: November 2007

Authorities on John Bunyan have traditionally failed to associate him with the radical millenarians known as the Fifth Monarchists. Only William York Tindall, in an analysis of Bunyan's millenarian principles, suggested their affinity with the views of the Fifth Monarchy Men. There is, however, an unnoticed passage in one of Bunyan's own works which indicates that he was at one time an adherent of Fifth Monarchist ideology. The work in question, The Advocateship of Jesus Christ (more commonly known under the second-issue title, The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate), was published in May 1688, shortly before Bunyan's death. Unlike several of his posthumous works, this book was not concerned with millenarian themes but with Christ's role as an attorney who pleaded the cause of the elect before God the supreme judge. Nevertheless, near the end of this work Bunyan recalled that “I did use to be much taken with one Sect of Christians, for that it was usually their way, when they made mention of the Name of Jesus, to call him, The blessed King of Glory”. Upon reflection—in a climate charged with tension as hostility to James II mounted—Bunyan calmly observed that ”Christians should do thus; ‘twould do them good.” He was not, of course, suggesting a revival of the Fifth Monarchy movement, but reminding his readers that their ultimate sovereign was Christ, not James II.

The passage is not important for its relevance to political conditions in 1688 but for its indication that Bunyan had once apparently been a disciple of the Fifth Monarchists, a fact not hitherto known. Unfortunately, he did not indicate at what point in his career he was attracted to these people, but it was either the period between his conversion in 1653 and his imprisonment seven years later, or the period from about the publication of The Holy War in 1682 to the collapse of the Fifth Monarchy movement in 1685.
G.R. Elton and his Era: Thirty Years On
Authors: Slavin Arthur J.
Published: November 2007

The recent publication by Cambridge University Press of the third volume of G.R. Elton's collected papers and reviews nearly coincided with two other events: the appearance of aflorilegiumentitledTudor Rule and Revolutionand presented to him on his sixtieth birthday, and the announcement of his appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge where he has been a Fellow of Clare and a mainstay of the University Department of History for three decades. During that time his work has ranged over the whole territory of the historian. Witness the scores of papers in a set of three fat volumes that is a selection and also the seventeen other published volumes of original work mainly based on archives, large narrative histories, and also books on the study and teaching of history. His major contributions also include the annual bibliography he has edited since 1977 as well as various series of monographs and archival indices which in themselves have been a major source of encouragement to the work of other scholars.

But G.R. Elton has not gathered flowers and tributes and honors because he is an industry in himself—a veritable Krupp among historians. It is rather the quality of his achievement that has been celebrated since the publication ofThe Tudor Revolution in Governmentin 1953. Once the radical theses of that book had been incorporated into the textEngland Under the Tudors(1955), the importance of his work has never been in doubt. Subsequent debates inPast and Presentand other journals, with Oxford medievalists and London Elizabethans, showed the impact of his main ideas.
British Imperial Attitudes in the Early Modern Era: The Case of Charles Ware Malet in India
Authors: Berlatsky Joel
Published: November 2007

Relationships between the representatives of British imperial expansion and the people of the regions which came under their influence have long been subjected to scholarly investigation. Such studies have focused on economic interdependencies, racial tensions, and military confrontations. In the case of India the best discussion of cultural interactions was presented fifty years ago by Percival Spear who examined the “social life of the English in eighteenth century India.” Spear was much concerned with the attitudes which the British developed towards the peoples of India in a period of transition which later led to “many of the problems of racial relations in India.” He pointed out that the early English traders were not burdened with color prejudice and were willing to adopt Indian customs when useful or profitable. As the number of Europeans, especially soldiers and women, increased in India, the early tolerance was overwhelmed by the view that Indian society was stagnant and morally inferior.

Subsequent evaluations of British attitudes in eighteenth century India have differed little from Spear's picture. George Bearce emphasized the sense of wonder many Englishmen held toward India and that their motivation in going there was primarily one of profit. He also underscored what Spear had previously noted, that “the British relied principally on British prejudices and thought, rather than a knowledge of India or standards devised from Indian experience.” The British believed that India had little to offer the West intellectually and that the climate combined with despotism had created a society incapable of change. There were rare exceptions to such generalizations, particularly in the period after Clive's success. Scholars such as William Jones and officials such as Warren Hastings came to have a greater appreciation for Indian culture. However, even Hastings measured Indian society by European standards, which led in less perceptive minds to “an acutely messianic form of racial pride and religious smugness.” By the turn of the nineteenth century most Europenas had adopted the “Peter Pan theory” of Asians as unchanging children. Subsequently, the inflexible attitudes of Evangelicals and Utilitarians produced “a ruling class consciously isolated and imbued with a sense of racial superiority.”
Lanfranc at Bec: A Reinterpretation
Authors: Vaughn Sally N.
Published: November 2007

It is the intent of this article to restore to Lanfranc's early career some of the luster that recent scholarly investigations have chipped away. I intend to show that historians have become overly skeptical of the traditional view of Lanfranc's dominating position during his eighteen years as prior of Bec (c.1045-63). On the basis of the best current research, he is no longer regarded during these years as a major ducal adviser but as a back-bencher, overshadowed by other Norman churchmen. His once-celebrated school at Bec has gone the way of the school of Chartres: it was a good school, but it functioned for only a short time, openingc.1059 or 1060 and closing three or four years later on Lanfranc's elevation to the abbacy of St-Étienne, Caen, in 1063. And some of its most famous alumni, including Pope Alexander II, are now believed not to have studied there at all. Similarly, Lanfranc's association with the papacy is thought to have been much exaggerated by earlier scholars. It is now doubted that he had anything to do with the dropping of the papal ban against Duke William's marriage with Matilda of Flanders, or with William's establishment of the two great abbeys at Caen.

It will be argued here that Lanfranc was indeed intimately associated with both the duke and the papacy, and that the school of Bec flourished as an international center of learning for many decades. No such reinterpretation can be attempted without taking into full account the growing sophistication in source analysis that has characterized recent scholarship on Lanfranc, and the systematic doubt that has been directed at the testimony of twelfth-century writers about eleventh-century Normandy. The dominating prior of Bec who emerges from A. J. MacDonald's 1926 biography of Lanfranc is no longer fully recoverable; yet the sources, when carefully evaluated, continue to portray Lanfranc as a major force in the political and intellectual life of his times.
Law, Politics, and Violence: The Treason Trials Act of 1696
Authors: Phifer James R.
Published: November 2007

In January, 1696, Parliament passed an act to reform the procedure used in treason trials. The consequences of this act were immense. It immediately changed the complexion of treason trials from that of conciliar hearings aimed at eliminating the government's enemies to that of actual trials which sought to establish guilt or innocence. Moreover, Parliament subsequently extended some of the key provisions of this act to criminal law proceedings, thus giving the 1696 statute a claim to being one of the well-springs of legal reform in modern England. Most important of all, however, was the effect the act had on politics. It helped to bring to a close an age in which politicians frequently attacked their opponents with charges of treason, and it thus played a part in opening a new age, one where less violent practices were employed in the political struggle.

It is not the least of ironies in English history that an act as important as the Treason Trials Act of 1696 should have received so little scholarly attention. The only historian to give the act more than a few pages is Samuel Rezneck in an article written in 1930. Most historians who work on the period follow the practice of such scholars as G. M. Trevelyan, David Ogg, and Sir Keith Feiling, and either fail to mention the act or note its passage in a sentence or two. Many scholars, especially those of an earlier generation, seem to assume that the act was a natural, perhaps inevitable, reaction to Stuart tyranny—that it was part of the light brought in by William and Mary at the end of a dark century—and, hence, that there is little need to discuss it.
Who Dubbed It “The Glorious Revolution?”
Authors: Hertzler James R.
Published: November 2007

It was not very glorious at first, at least to many English people of the late seventeenth century. With a king of undoubted legitimacy squeezed out and a new, albeit related monarch installed and recognized by Parliament, the transaction shook government, nation and church alike. It left Jacobite and non-juring splinters all round. The Revolution, happening in fulfillment of ideals of exclusionist Whigs, did not entirely satisfy those partisans, who soon learned that they could not control their masterful king, William III. As for the Tories, their consciences ached due to their resistance to a divinely-appointed sovereign. Few highly-placed Englishmen were comfortable with their need to call in a foreigner to help them solve their domestic squabbles. Indeed, one writer, reflecting on the letter inviting the Prince of Orange to invade England, thought it would have been “more glorious … to assist our undoubted Soveraign [sic], then to suffer him to be dethroned, solely because he is a Roman Catholic.”

Twentieth-century historians called the Revolution other names than “glorious.” It has been dubbed a “sensible,” a “model,” a “moral,” a “respectable,” a “palace,” and simply the English Revolution. All agreed that it was indeed a Revolution, and they themselves were in agreement with some early writers who were contemporary with the event. The Orange Gazette, at the very end of the year 1688, reported on “the Revolutions that had occurred.” The historian Nicholas Tindal wrote that William of Orange himself, in a speech before the House of Lords, spoke of “this late Revolution.” Considerable discussion ensued in Parliament and in pamphlets as to whether William conquered James, or whether the king had abdicated, or had deserted his kingdom. But little question with contemporaries: there was a Revolution.