bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Crown Land and Royal Patronage in Mid-Sixteenth Century England
Authors: Wyndham Katherine S.H. 
Published: February 2004

Yf you thincke yt to be suche lande as I maye geve wythe my honor, I shall thincke yt verye well bestowyd, for that he is one that hathe well desarvyd yt and hathe had no kynde of recompence.So wrote Mary Tudor to the Marquis of Winchester in 1554. The subject of the Queen's approval was Sir Edmund Peckham, one of her most trusted councilors. The result of that approval was an outright gift of land worth nearly one hundred pounds a year.Land, the basis of the social structure of the age, was one of the crucial instruments of patronage. The crown estate not only had its financial function as a regular source of income and an emergency source of realizable capital, but one directly relevant to social control and to government. It was a means by which past services to the prince could be rewarded and future services perhaps anticipated. The way land was used for this purpose and whether the frequency and extent of its usage can throw any light on problems and methods of government are questions meriting close consideration. The period taken here—the late 1530s to the early 1570s—spans several very different phases of government: how far did policy towards patronage vary from phase to phase? And how far did these variations reflect the needs of each successive government?To acquire an accurate picture of the use of the crown's estate, some localized knowledge is essential.
The County Community in Stuart Historiography
Authors: Holmes Clive 
Published: February 2004

The 1635 ship money writ elicited a “common feeling of dissatisfaction” throughout England. It was the general belief that the tax contravened “fundamental law,” and that in its imposition Charles “had deliberately treated the nation as a stranger to his counsels, and that if his claim to levy money by his own authority were once admitted, the door would be open to other demands of which it was impossible to foresee the limits.” Contrast this account by S.R. Gardiner with a more recent analysis of the response to ship money provided by J.S. Morrill, a scholar who has acknowledged a substantial intellectual debt to Alan Everitt, the progenitor and leading exponent of the concept of the “county community” in seventeenth-century England. “The King's right to levy the rate was rarely questioned in the provinces. Ship money was hated for its costliness and its disruptive effects on the social and political calm of the communities … Above all,” the levy was detested because “it exemplified the government's insensitivity toward localist sentiment and belief.”In these divergent accounts, a fundamental difference emerges between the traditional school of English historians and the county community school of local historians. For Gardiner, seventeenth-century Englishmen were fully aware of and vitally concerned about the actions of their national rulers, actions they evaluated against the touchstone of constitutional principle. Everitt and Morrill insist, by contrast, that even the gentry were “surprisingly ill informed” about “wider political issues”; they were “simply not concerned with affairs of state.”
The Bristol Bridge Riot and Its Antecedents: Eighteenth-Century Perception of the Crowd
Authors: Jones Philip D. 
Published: February 2004

The Bristol Bridge Riot of 1793 was one of the most serious riots, in terms of killed and injured, to occur in Britain during the last half of the eighteenth century. George Rudé lists it as second in violence only to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Yet, because it defies classification, it is rarely listed in the categories of riots so meticulously set out by Rudé and others. It was neither a turnpike riot transferred to an urban setting, nor was it the expression of long-held social grievances. It was a demonstration of dissatisfaction with official incompetence and deception. In many respects it was a riot caused by officials whose perception of the crowd led them to overreaction and violence.The tendency by recent writers has been to see riotous activity in the eighteenth century as a sort of class warfare between the “people” and the “establishment,” represented by land owners, entrepreneurs, or parliament. This class warfare is presented as taking various forms under the categories of food riot, urban riot, country riot, and the like. While classification of riots may serve useful purposes and there may sometimes be more than a grain of truth in the class-war interpretation, it must be acknowledged that the resulting impression of uniformity in eighteenth-century riots is misleading. In the case of Bristol riots, in particular, it is the differences rather than the similarities that are of significance in understanding the changed perception of the crowd that caused the tragedy of 1793.
Arthur Wellesley and the Cintra Convention: A New Look at an Old Puzzle
Authors: Schneer Richard M. 
Published: February 2004

News of a great victory over Napoleon's forces in Portugal was published in London on the morning of September 2, 1808. The celebrations that began the night before with the firing of cannon in the parks and the pealing of the city's church bells spread from one end of the country to the other and did not subside for nearly two weeks: it was the first important victory for a British army since the war began in 1793. Ever since, the glorious Battle of Vimeiro has been associated with the name of Wellington who, as young General Sir Arthur Wellesley, won his spurs on that occasion by (in his own words) winning “a complete victory” with only half his army over “the whole of the French force in Portugal … under the command of the Due D'Abrantes in person.” Following publication of his vainglorious communiqué and the more sober official announcements, the country waited impatiently for details of the French surrender.Historical accounts of the event are all in agreement as to what happened after the battle and who was to blame for what proved to be a fiasco in Portugal: after leading his troops to victory, Wellesley (through no fault of his own) had been superseded on the field by General Harry Burrard who, in turn, was replaced on the following day by General Hew Dalrymple. These peculiar revolutions in the command are traceable to political in-fighting at home and the vagaries of travel in the days of sailing ships and have nothing to do with the story except that it was Dalrymple not Wellesley who was in command when the armistice between the contending forces was negotiated. Dalrymple, according to the orthodox exegesis, a stubborn blunderer, negotiated the agreement with the French representative, General Kellermann, and literally gave away the hard-won fruits of Wellesley's victory.
The Philosophical and Religious Thought of Arthur James Balfour (1848-1930)
Authors: Root John David 
Published: February 2004

Alec R. Vidler recently remarked that “It is because he was at least two men that Balfour is the most interesting Prime Minister of this century.” He was both a man of political action and a philosopher. In the opinion of Sir Austen Chamberlain, Balfour had “the finest brain that has been applied to politics in our time.” Blanche Dugdale adds that “No one can understand Arthur Balfour who forgets that interest in speculative thinking was part of the fabric of his everyday existence, wherever he was, whatever he was doing.” But no matter that Balfour's involvement in philosophy, theology, science, and psychical research often superseded his active involvement in the affairs of state. The image of a dilettante persists in most biographical studies. One of the reasons for this historiographical problem was stated well in an early biographical sketch:… Balfour's real achievement as a metaphysician is not easy to determine, and none the more that his fame as a statesman tended to advertise his work with the vulgar and depreciate it with the elect. The former took him at his word and proclaimed him without further ado a philosopher; the latter dismissed him without too much consideration as an amateur.Whether “vulgar” or “elect,” the public was slow to appreciate the mind of Arthur Balfour. It was not until the publication of his second book, The Foundations of Belief (1895), that Balfour received critical attention as a thinker.
The Conservative Basis for the Formation of the National Government of 1931
Authors: Fair John D. 
Published: February 2004

The creation of the National Government of 1931 has been a theme of unending comment and controversy. Politicians and writers of the left, with their party suddenly decapitated and bereft of office, not surprisingly were bitter. Their tendency was to castigate anyone who had played an obvious role in the crisis. Therefore, Ramsay MacDonald, who presided over the change, has been branded a traitor by his former colleagues and by later generations of Labour supporters. Even for historians he has remained at the center of the controversy.From a slightly wider perspective, it has been possible to suspect a “bankers' ramp,” and the king has been singled out for special abuse on the charge of misleading the prime minister. Although some of these elements have been dismissed as myths in Reginald Bassett's 1958 treatise, the controversy hardly has been brought closer to a solution. In his review of that polemical study, Richard Crossman contended that “no one has yet succeeded in writing about this crisis without violent partisanship” and that it remained “the kind of live political issue about which no one except a political eunuch can write dispassionately.” That the debate continues is evident from the recent biography of MacDonald by David Marquand, who, in an attempt to vindicate his subject, once more reverts to the king as the agent most responsible for the creation of a coalition. Amazingly, no writer has yet interpreted the formation of the National Government as a Conservative Party bid for power, despite the control manifested by that party in the ensuing general election and the eventual successions of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain to the premiership.
Covenant, Crown, and Commons in Elizabethan Puritanism
Authors: McGiffert Michael 
Published: February 2004

Elizabethan puritanism, becoming programmatic, declared its intentions for the church inAn Admonition to the Parliament, by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and in theSecond Admonition to the Parliament, both in 1572. The first of those manifestos erected a “true platform of a church reformed” according to “the prescript of God's word” and the examples of the “best reformed churches throughout Christendom.” The second took up what its author called “the hardest point,” namely, to show how reform was to be accomplished—in effect, by persuading queen and parliament to become presbyterian. The admonishers appealed to the power of God's word, the threat of his wrath, and the promise of his reward, presenting the cause of reform as a national case of conscience for the civil authority.Two years earlier, in a bold sermon to the queen, another spokesman for the faction had set forth these same considerations but with a significant difference, for the preacher, Edward Dering, grounded his argument on a theopolitical principle—the principle of covenant—which Protestant extremists (including English and Scottish exiles of the Marian period) had already given a revolutionary twist. This article examines the role of ideas of covenant in the ideological address of sixteenth-century puritanism to crown and commons, prince and people. It finds in the reformers' changing conceptions and applications of covenant a key to the character of the puritan movement and the making of the puritan mind.Though puritans of the Elizabethan era made something of covenant doctrine in their theological writings, they rarely put it to political use, and when they did—when some hardy preacher proposed to constrain the civil magistracy by covenant to do God's will—such efforts boomeranged, endangering both the preacher and his cause.
Elizabethan Familists and English Separatism
Authors: Martin J.W. 
Published: February 2004

This essay examines the extensive attention received in the England of the 1570s by the small religious sect calling itself the Family of Love and professing allegiance to the continental mystic, Hendrik Niclas; it also examines why the Elizabethan establishment became, for a time, so disturbed about the Familists. A rough indicator of the attention is found in theShort-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in English, 1475-1640, where the individual entries for Niclas and other Familist writers outnumber all other separatists before 1600, including such men as Robert Browne and Henry Barrow. (In another comparison, they outnumber the entries under Martin Marprelate also.) The establishment's concern was evinced in several ways. The Family was written or preached against by three members of the bench of bishops, besides lesser clerics; matters relating to it were discussed by the privy council on thirteen different occasions between June 1575 and January 1581; and on October 3,1580 it was the exclusive target of a royal proclamation.Until the past decade or so, the attention aroused by the Familists in Elizabethan England has not been much reflected in the writings of modern historians. Those interested in the Family itself have dealt largely with its continental developments. They have described the sect Niclas founded at Emden in 1540, with its emphasis on personal religious experience, spiritual rebirth and the close fellowship of the faithful, and they have traced its growth in the Low Countries and contiguous areas.
The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647
Authors: Gleissner Richard A. 
Published: February 2004

Natural law is one of the oldest concepts in Western philosophy. When the Psalmist asked Yahweh, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him,” he was struggling with the same problem that occupied thoughtful men in Greece: the need to understand man as he is and in his potentiality. Unlike the unknown Biblical poet, however, Plato and Aristotle found an answer with the aid of reason rather than revelation. For them, man is an entity in process of becoming, possessing an essential, cognizable nature that gives rise to certain inclinations he must fulfill. Until the Enlightenment, the idea of man's nature and his need to realize it served as the focus of much of secular thought, out of which developed principles of government and a distinctive ethic. But ordinary people were touched only by the practical consequences of such things. The great law codes and the teachings of the church combined with philosophy to work out the individual's relationship to others according to a teleological conception of law rooted in the very nature of things. Understandably, the ontological theses and conclusions drawn from the theory of natural law remained irrelevant and unknown to common folk.In the midst of the English Civil War, the concept appeared in the welter of disputes and conflicting plans for the revitalization of all aspects of English life, invoked by ordinary men who were neither philosophers nor theologians, neither jurists nor statesmen. This paper considers the use of natural law by one group, the Levellers, at a dramatic moment in the turbulent period following the king's imprisonment.
The Government and Church Patronage in England, 1660-1760
Authors: Hirschberg D.R. 
Published: February 2004

In the last twenty years we have seen a revolution in the study of later Stuart and early Georgian England. Spurred in great part by Robert Walcott's brave attempt to apply Namierian methods and assumptions to the early eighteenth century, a squadron of able historians has attacked the sociopolitical history of the period, and has given us what might be called a neo-Whig interpretation. Such scholars as Geoffrey Holmes, William Speck, John Western, and recently B.W. Hill and J.P. Kenyon have sifted through the historiographical detritus and discovered that there is much to be saved from the older interpretations.Most importantly, the new scholarship on the period 1660-1760 has reemphasized a vital political factionalism, whether it be called party strife or merely shifting ideological alliances. English social and political groups apparently stood in a fragile equilibrium at best, rather than in a solid Namierian consensus. Even J.H. Plumb has noted the pressures brought to bear on relatively weak post-Revolution central governments by influential sociopolitical interest groups, pressures that restricted severely the available options for policy and power. E.P Thompson would go farther to claim that factionalism (mainly that of an elite against the rest of society) was so ingrained that only by using repressive means was Sir Robert Walpole's government able to stay in the saddle. Even if some would disagree with Hill's contention that there was always an effective Tory opposition, few deny that debate on issues that were deemed basic—including the form of government, of social organization, and of thought—continued far beyond 1688 or even 1714.
The Making of a Pocket Borough: Cockermouth 1722-1756
Authors: Beckett J.V. 
Published: February 2004

In the last week of September 1756, Sir James Lowther of Lowther, the famous eighteenth-century boroughmonger, spent more than 58,000 pounds securing 134 burgages in the parliamentary borough of Cockermouth. When added to the twenty-four he already possessed this gave him more than half the total. As a result, he was recognized thereafter as being able to return both members for the borough. The Earl of Egremont, whose family had held the strongest interest since the borough was restored in 1641 to the ancient privilege of returning two members to parliament, was completely eclipsed. His younger brother, Percy Wyndham O'Brien, who had been returned with his support in 1754, retreated to Minehead at the 1761 election. Cockermouth was not contested again before the 1832 Reform Act, and its two members were counted among Lowther's famous ninepins.Pocket boroughs were one result of the oligarchic structure that came to characterize English political life by the middle of the eighteenth century. The vigorous party struggles of Queen Anne's reign had melted away following the eclipse of the Tories and the passing in 1716 of the Septennial Act. In its place came the long Whig ascendancy, a period of political torpor that rendered burgage boroughs, in the words of Sir Lewis Namier, “predestined to become pocket boroughs.” Longer parliaments pushed up the cost of election contests, which in consequence became less frequent. If one did take place and the result was close, the inflated cost of canvassing was likely to be compounded by the near certainty of a petition.
From Men of Letters to Intellectuals: The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Heyck T.W. 
Published: February 2004

One of the strangest facts about intellectual life in the Victorian years in England is that for most of the period there does not seem to have been any intellectuals. There was no group of people designated as “the intellectuals” or even “the intellectual elite.” Only if one chooses to take a functional definition of intellectuals—for instance, people “who create, distribute, and applyculture, that is, the symbolic world of man”—then can it be said that Victorian England had “intellectuals.” However, Egyptian temple priests, medieval monks, and modern university professors can all be grouped this way. Thus this definition is misleading, for not all thinkers have stood in the same relation to their own societies, nor have societies looked upon their thinkers in the same way, or even considered that the various kinds of thinkers should be considered as a group or class. In the Victorian period, from about 1830 to 1870, the English almost never used phrases such as “an intellectual” or “the intellectuals” as nouns to denote a particular kind of person or group of persons. Such phrases had been used in the romantic period, and they were readopted with increasing frequency from the 1870s on; but in the early and mid-Victorian years, the English used terms such as “men of letters,” literary men, poets, prophets, scientists to denote those who gave symbolic interpretation to experience.The change in usage from “men of letters” and other such terms to “intellectuals” was no trivial change in linguistic style; rather, it marked a profound transformation of the economic, social, and conceptual relations in which the writers and thinkers stood.
Radicalism, Pressure Groups, and Party Politics: from the National Education League to the National Liberal Federation
Authors: Auspos Patricia 
Published: February 2004

The National Education League came to prominence in the 1870s as the most militant of the pressure groups that spearheaded the so-called “Nonconformist Revolt” from the Liberal Party. The revolt began in 1870, reached its peak in 1873, and contributed to the Liberal defeat in the general election of 1874. It finally petered out in the wake of that defeat and the emergence of a revitalized liberalism during the Eastern Question agitation in the late 1870s. The National Education League was founded in 1869, and disbanded in 1877, in the midst of the Eastern Question agitation. Because its dates are coincident with the revolt, and because it did play a crucial role in that movement, the league's history has been treated as an integral part of the Nonconformist Revolt. The revolt itself has been generally interpreted as a sectionalist attack on the Liberal Party, launched by Nonconformist grievance organizations for narrow, and largely sectarian, aims. According to this view, the revolt ended when the Nonconformists finally accepted the notion of a comprehensive liberalism that transcended their particularist interests; when they recognized that, politically speaking, they were Liberals before they were Nonconformists.This explanation is misleading because it ignores the generally radical thrust of the Nonconformist Revolt and the agitations of groups such as the United Kingdon Alliance and the Liberation Society. In particular, the rise and fall of the National Education League cannot be understood solely within the context of Nonconformist politics.
Lord Willoughby de Broke and the Politics of Radical Toryism, 1909-1914
Authors: Phillips Gregory D. 
Published: February 2004

In the midst of the political controversies of the early twentieth century, Lord Willoughby de Broke, a landed aristocrat with little parliamentary experience, emerged as a major political figure. An ally of the Chamberlains, Lord Milner, Sir Edward Carson, and Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review, he became a significant spokesman for extreme conservatism. During the Parliament Bill struggle, the battle over the Conservative leadership in the fall of 1911, and the Home Rule crisis, Willoughby de Broke organized the efforts of peers and other Conservatives radically dissatisfied with the direction of British politics. Since 1914 Willoughby de Broke has become a symbol of reaction and traditionalist resistance to change: the fox-hunting nobleman “whose face,” in Dangerfield's wellknown description, “bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse,” and who “was not more than two hundred years behind his time.” Such an analysis, however, is more amusing than accurate. In fact, while Willoughby de Broke's objectives were basically those of a traditional landed aristrocrat, his methods and emphases strongly prefigured those of later rightist politicians, both British and continental: tactics of political democracy could be mastered in order to preserve the status quo.Although Willoughby de Broke often fondly recalled the patriarchical society he had known in his childhood on a great estate, he did not merely attempt to recreate the past. He and his political associates, for all their commitment to conservatism, understood that important adaptations would have to be made to new conditions.