bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The After-life of General Gordon
Authors: Behrman Cynthia F. 
Published: November 2007

In February of 1885 news was flashed to England from Egypt that General Gordon was dead, stabbed by an Arab spear as the hordes of the Mahdi were overrunning the city of Khartoum in the Sudan. Dead he certainly was and nothing could resurrect him, and yet he has survived in the pages of biography, in the comments of the press, and in the mythology of culture. His “after-life” reveals some interesting facts about the nature of hero-worship and the role heroes play in the ethos of a national people and their self-image.Charles George Gordon was born in January, 1833, the second son of a military family. He was trained for the military, too, became a Royal Engineer, and fought in the Crimean War. He saw service in Turkey, and then was sent to China where he gained fame in the suppression of the Taiping rebellion against the Manchu Empire in 1864, earning the nickname of “Chinese Gordon” at home and a Companion of the Bath from a grateful English government. The next six years he spent in service at Gravesend, constructing defensive fortifications, and devoting much of his time to rehabilitative work with the poor street boys of the town. Another six years he spent in Equatorial Sudan in an unsuccessful struggle to eliminate the slave trade. A brief period as Secretary to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India, was followed by service in Mauritius, and fighting against the Basuto uprising in South Africa for the Cape Government. The penultimate year of his life he wandered in the Holy Land, and finally he answered the call to return to the Sudan, which was threatened by the revolt of Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi.
Joseph Conrad: Russia and England
Authors: Magill Lewis M. 
Published: November 2007

To assert that Joseph Conrad was the first English novelist to recognize a basic English ignorance of Russia and the Russians would be patently absurd. As early as 1891, Rudyard Kipling began his short story “The Man Who Was” with this cryptic sentence: “Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt.” He then follows this opening with a concrete example of the difficulty one can encounter in trying to measure a Russian by Western European standards.Winston Churchill's famous dictum (as part of a statement made in 1939) exemplifies this difficulty: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”Joseph Conrad, however, was in a more favorable position than most English citizens of the twentieth century to interpret Russian behavior to the West. Born in 1857 in Russian Poland, he had been in a peculiarly advantageous situation to observe first-hand the Tsarist autocracy. In 1862 his father was condemned to exile in Russia because he had taken a leading role in the formation of the secret Polish National Committee. Conrad's mother, there-upon, chose to accompany her husband into exile, taking young Joseph with her. By 1863, the mother had contracted tuberculosis as a result of the hardships she suffered in Russia. After she died in 1865, Joseph was allowed to return to Poland in the care of a maternal uncle. His father was released in 1868 and moved to Cracow with his son, only to die during the following year. Joseph returned to his uncle's home, where he remained until he left for Marseilles in 1874.
French Huguenots and the Civil List, 1696-1727: A Study of Alien Assimilation in England
Authors: Sundstrom Roy A. 
Published: November 2007

Historians have long recognized that England was a haven for many French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in their native land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They have also acknowledged the subsequent contributions which these immigrants made to English society. But scholars have largely ignored the financial assistance given many Huguenots which helped them adjust to a new society.The purpose of this article is to describe the amount and the administration of the most important element of this financial assistance—the Civil List funds given the Huguenots from 1696 to 1727.The reasons why French Protestants fled their homeland center around Louis XIV's determination that a strong France be one, religiously and politically. This policy, which came to a climax with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, undoubtedly reflected the opinion of most Frenchmen—to tolerate Calvinism was to court national disunity and encourage heresy. Without religious uniformity there was neither social harmony nor political solidarity.Louis's objective was not expulsion: it was conversion. And he was overwhelmingly successful. By razing Huguenot churches, offering monetary rewards to converts, denying Protestants entry into the legal and other professions, and placing dragoons in their homes, the king forced the great majority to abjure. They preferred to await the dawn of a more tolerant age rather than endure further intimidation or physical harm.
Charles I and Local Government: The Draining of the East and West Fens
Authors: Kennedy Mark E. 
Published: November 2007

“The dissolution of this government,” suggested James Harrington, “caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government.” This dictum has recently received favorable attention not only from a historian who sought the causes of the English Revolution in the great social and economic changes of the sixteenth century, but also from one who described the Civil War as the product of the financial weakness of the Stuart monarchy. The agreement, in at least this one respect, of two such disparate interpreters is heartening. If Professors Stone and Russell are correct in their assessment of Harrington, then the task of the historian of the Civil War is that much simpler. In order to understand the outbreak of armed conflict in 1642 the historian must first understand the collapse of government in 1640.Many explanations for this collapse have already been advanced. What is interesting from a historiographical perspect is the limited number of variables considered. Whether regarding them as merely precipitants or as major casual factors, historians have concentrated almost exclusively on the great programs of Charles's government: the Book of Orders, the perfect militia, Laudianism, extraparliamentary taxation. This fixation remains largely unaffected even by the recent outpouring of local studies.
An Outsider's View: Alexis de Tocqueville on Aristocratic Society and Politics in 19th Century England
Authors: Spring David 
Published: November 2007

This brief account of Tocqueville's ideas on aristocratic society and government in England is intended to serve as a sort of introduction to the longer papers that follow in this symposium. For some years the subject of English aristocratic power in the 19th century—especially in connection with the First and Second Reform Acts—has been much discussed. The discussion has dwelt on such questions as whether the aristocracy grew or declined in power, whether the Reform Acts made for a growth or loss of power, whether aristocratic leadership knew precisely what it was doing, and so on. So far this discussion has been carried on, so to speak, exclusively from the inside: that is, in terms of contemporary English events and ideas. In Tocqueville, who was both an Anglophile and an informed and penetrating observer of England from the 1830s until his death in 1859, we have a distinguished outsider. His ideas are always interesting for their own sake. For this symposium they have the added merit of touching on some of its central themes. On occasion, his ideas may strike the reader as exaggerated, ambiguous, even inconsistent, certainly without system. But they are usually suggestive, and merit the historian's serious attention.Tocqueville's first impression of the English aristocracy was one of great power—a power rooted in its monopoly of landowner ship. As he saw it, the contrast between the French landowning aristocracy and the English was that between an aristocracy, on the one hand, that was land poor, and an aristocracy, on the other hand, that was richly endowed in land. Tocqueville also saw that if landed property did not always lead to economic power—since agriculture did not pay that well—it had a special quality, as compared to other forms of wealth, which was bound to lead to political power.
Frank Ives Scudamore and the Post Office Telegraphs
Authors: Perry Charles R. 
Published: November 2007

Frank Ives Scudamore remains one of the least known of those Victorian civil servants who were, to use Sir James Stephen's phrase, statesmen in disguise. Readers of Trollope's autobiography may recall that Scudamore, the novelist's younger rival in the Post Office bureaucracy, emerged the victor in their 1867 contest for the department's Second Secretaryship. Indeed, it was Scudamore's triumph which finally convinced Trollope to resign from the Post Office in order to devote full time to writing. Yet Scudamore's importance has a much more substantial foundation than this incident in literary history. Even if one does not completely accept the Spectator's judgment that Scudamore was “perhaps the very ablest [civil servant] in the service of the crown,” he was still an administrator of fundamental consequence. As director of the first significant experiment in nationalization undertaken in modern British history—the 1870 acquisition of the telegraphs—Scudamore played a major role in the growth of the modern state.Scudamore's impact on the course of government expansion has not been sufficiently studied and explored. It is certainly correct, as Professor Perkin recently pointed out, that the Victorians talked more of nationalization than actually attempting it. However, the fact that Scudamore was involved in an unusual activity does not mean that the endeavor was minor or the results unimportant. After all, he managed a department which in 1874 had over 3,600 offices spread in a network across the entire country and which collected over £1,000,000 in gross revenue. Such an operation deserves historical consideration in its own right.
Women and Imperialism: The Colonial Office and Female Emigration to South Africa, 1901-1910
Authors: Blakeley Brian L. 
Published: November 2007

The emigration of women to South Africa and the other parts of the empire had been periodically promoted throughout the nineteenth century, but it was that great imperial crisis known as the Boer War which gave such emigration an immediate political and patriotic importance. The emigration of women, especially single women, was increasingly viewed not only as a means of assisting unfortunate, superfluous individuals but as a way of strengthening the empire—a matter of imperial urgency. By 1901 the issue of female emigration had become a part, and some argued the most important part, of the larger question of how to secure the South African colonies to the British Empire in more than name. An organized program for sending single women to South Africa was therefore jointly developed by the Colonial Office and the emigration societies which had long been interested in this work. This alliance between the hard-nosed bureaucrats of Downing Street and the amateurish gentlewomen who ran such organizations as the British Women's Emigration Association seldom, as events proved, operated smoothly, contributing in part to its limited success. This attempt to stimulate the settlement of women in South Africa is important, however, in illustrating the national mood in the aftermath of the victory in South Africa, the increased involvements of women in imperial affairs, and the difficulties facing the advocates of female emigration.The origins of Joseph Chamberlain's, and hence the Colonial Office's, interest in female emigration is difficult to pinpoint. The preliminary report of 1900 of the Lands Settlement Commission chaired by H.O. Arnold-Forster drew the attention of the office to the demographic weakness of the British position in South Africa.
James I and the Historians: Not a Bad King After All?
Authors: Lee Maurice 
Published: November 2007

In 1974 Professor Marc Schwarz published a review article on the historical reputation of King James I, in which he pointed out that that reputation had considerably improved in recent years. The slobbering pedant, lazy, conceited, cowardly, alcoholic, spendthrift, fancying pretty young men and giving them far too much influence in court and council: the lineaments of this caricature, first drawn by that foul-mouthed discharged officeholder Anthony Weldon, have not altogether vanished. But as historians have examined various aspects of the king's reign, reread the sources un-blinkered by the biases and assumptions characteristic of the Victorians and perpetuated in this century, from their widely varying points of view, by the disciples of Gloriana and of Karl Marx, a different view of King James has begun to emerge. The new picture of the king is that of a seeker of the via media at home and of peace abroad, a man with acute political antennae whose style was anything but confrontational and whose success in achieving that via media, and in keeping the peace, was comparable to that of his much-admired predecessor. Typical of the converts is Professor J.P. Kenyon, who in 1958 adopted the traditional view of James in his collection of essays on the Stuart kings, but who twenty years later described him as “a strange medley of opposites: he was a fool in some sense, but in others a great man.”Professor Schwarz's analysis of the recent literature dealt in some detail with four areas: the king's policy toward the church and especially toward the Puritans; foreign affairs; James's views of the constitution and his relations with parliament; and his rule in Scotland. On some other matters there had been no attempt to defend the king: his disastrous economic and fiscal policies, including the inflation of honors, and his predilection for favorites like Somerset and Buckingham. In a number of these areas the work of the past ten years has done nothing to alter Schwarz's verdicts. No significant new work on foreign policy has appeared save in connection with other matters, to be discussed below; the era awaits its R.B. Wernham. There has been no attempt to defend James's irresponsible attitude toward money, which was by far his worst failing as a king, and there is reason to suppose that his financial reputation is irredeemable. It might be pointed out, however, that the Jacobean age was a postwar era, a period of relaxation after the long period of domestic and foreign tension which began when Henry VIII decided to put aside his wife.
James Ussher and “Ussherian” Episcopacy, 1640–1656: The Primate and His Reduction Manuscript
Authors: Abbott William M. 
Published: November 2007

The most important contribution made by Archbishop James Ussher to the ecclesiastical developments of the Interregnum and Restoration periods was his short tract The Reduction of Episcopacy Unto the Form of Synodical Government. Printed only after his death in 1656, its combination of ministerial synods with episcopal rule was seen as a basis for presbyterian-episcopal reconciliation over the next three decades. The tract was printed in five editions during the later 1650s, and came out in two more editions in 1679, when the Popish Plot and the calling of a new Parliament revived hopes that dissenters could be comprehended within the Church of England. It was printed once more in 1689, in Edinburgh, when “comprehension” was again being hotly debated in both England and Scotland. By that time Ussher's name had come to symbolize such “limited” or “primitive” episcopacy, and indeed it has continued to do so among twentieth-century historians.The fame of the Reduction rests upon its content and authorship. Although the tract was only one of many such compromises offered during the Interregnum, it was the most radical to come from the royalist and Anglican side during that period. Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Ussher was admired and respected by radical puritans and major Laudian spokesmen such as Henry Hammond and Bishop John Bramhall. The power of Ussher's name in this context was shown in 1685, when the nonconformist divine and politician Richard Baxter was on trial for allegedly making a printed attack against the king and the bishops. When Baxter's attorney, Sir Henry Pollexfen, sought to introduce as evidence one of Baxter's own printed compromises between episcopal and presbyterian government, Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys replied, “I will see none of his books; it is for primitive Episcopacy, I will warrant you — a bishop in every parish.” In replying “Nay, my lord, it is the same with Archbishop Usher's,” Pollexfen indicated both the radical nature of the Reduction and the legitimacy that Ussher's name lent to other compromises of this kind.
The Gentlemen Pensioners, the Duke of Northumberland, and the Attempted Coup of July 1553
Authors: Tighe William J. 
Published: November 2007

The band of gentlemen pensioners, a body which, diminished in size and its functions altered almost beyond recognition, still survives at the English royal court under the title of “The Honourable Corps of Her Majesty's Gentlemen at Arms,” was instituted on Christmas Eve 1539 as part of a reform of the royal household. The group was a revival of the “spears” or “spears of honour,” an elite, sumptuously-outfitted royal bodyguard of gentlemen founded by Henry VIII in 1509, shortly after his accession, which appears to have lapsed in 1515 or 1516, because of the great charges involved in their maintenance, according to Hall's chronicle. The revived group was provided for in a rather more modest manner than its predecessor had been, but its members served much the same purposes. They were the king's elite bodyguard, his personal companions in arms when he went to war, the principal participants in tournaments and other martial sports at court and, more generally, a courtly and military finishing school for the sons of nobility and gentry.From 1540 until 1670, when the band underwent its first reduction in size, its structural organization remained unchanged in all essentials. It consisted of fifty men and five officers, a captain, lieutenant, standard-bearer, clerk of the check and harbinger. The last two were ancillary offices, the keeper of the “check-list” or attendance roll and his deputy, and were not strictly speaking members of the corps, but its servants. The lieutenant and the standard-bearer were normally men who had served for a time as gentlemen pensioners before being appointed to these offices, while the captain, on the contrary, was a figure of some importance at court in his own right, and one who had not previously served in the band. After the death of the first captain, Sir Anthony Browne, Henry VIII's master of the horse, in 1548, subsequent captains under the Tudor and early Stuart monarchs were all peers and almost always held other great offices of state. Browne's successor, William Parr, marquess of Northampton, was Edward VI's lord chamberlain; he lost all of his offices and titles on Mary's accession and was lucky to escape with his life. Thomas Radcliffe, lord Fitzwalter, later earl of Sussex, succeeded him in the captaincy, holding it continuously until his death in 1583. From 1572 he held the office of lord chamberlain to the queen. His Elizabethan successors in the captaincy, the first and second lords Hunsdon, father and son, the queen's kinsmen, also held the lord chamberlainship.
The Historicity of the Alleluja Victory
Authors: Jones Michael E. 
Published: November 2007

The subject of this paper is a celebrated incident in Constantius' Life of St. Germanus. The work is a near contemporary piece, evidently drawing on eye witness accounts. It was composed in Gaul about 480 A.D. Constantius provides several interesting and possibly historical details concerning conditions in Britain during the transition from Celtic independence to Saxon dominance. St. Germanus visited Britain in 429 to combat the Pelagian heresy. While there, according to Constantius, he led the Britons in a military victory over invading Picts and Saxons, the Alleluja Victory. He thereafter passed into a prominent position in British legend and history.This biography of St. Germanus and particularly the incident of the miracle victory have long been the focus of a lively historical debate. Incidental details in Constantius' work including references to cities, synods, and men bearing vaguely Roman titles in Britain have been accepted (rather uncritically) as genuine. Others have rejected the work as historically valueless and suggested that the Alleluja victory is simply an allegory based on Biblical miracles such as the fall of the walls of Jericho.
The Anglican Pulpit, the Social Order, and the Resurgence of Toryism during the American Revolution
Authors: Bradley James E. 
Published: November 2007

“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in hisEnglish Whiggism and the American Revolution(1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to theHistory of ParliamentJohn Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.