bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII: a Question of Perspective
Authors: Smith Lacey Baldwin 
Published: February 2004

That mighty prince, Henry VIII, died on Friday, the 28th of January, 1547, at two of the morning. The final years of the reign had been moving ponderously and inexorably to this moment when the King must die. The instant, however, that Henry slipped from life into death, a fundamental change took place. Not only was an irascible old man gone but so also was the dread and anxiety that had surrounded the concluding months of the King's life. For half a decade Tudor England had lived with the terrible certainty that Henry's reign was drawing to a close and the equally terrible uncertainty of not knowing when death would claim its sovereign. Thrice within the final year, in March, October, and December, Henry had approached death and had drawn away. No prediction could be secure, no plan assured so long as the moment of death remained unrecorded.If Henry's death cleared the air and dispersed the atmosphere of fear and insecurity enveloping those who attended upon his passing, it also introduced a new and befuddling note for those who must record and narrate his departure. The ultimate irony of the historical profession is that the historian is a victim of his own knowledge; the breadth of his vision backward through the glass of time distorts his image of the past. He knows when, where and how the old King died; he can even date the event to the hour. In contrast, those who so impatiently awaited or dreaded the sovereign's demise could only speculate and form their plans upon the slender thread of surmise.
Sir Lewis Namier Considered
Authors: Mansfield Harvey C. 
Published: February 2004

The late Sir Lewis Namier seems to have the highest, or nearly the highest authority of historians, chiefly for his work on English politics in the 1760's. This article attempts to make a judgment of his authority by examining the truth of his findings about English politics in the 1760's. Namier's authority is in great part based upon his seeming care in his researches, since people suppose that those who are occupied with details are careful with details. The results of his researches must therefore be considered in their presentation. But these researches need not be redone, at least for the purpose of understanding Namier's findings; for his findings rest upon an argument — an argument constructed not only from the results of researches but from general statements that are not results of his researches. Indeed, it happens that Namier's general statements fall within political science, as that subject has been understood since Aristotle. The present writer is a political scientist, and proposes to concentrate on Namier's argument.Namier's principal conclusion is that there was no danger of tyranny in Britain in the 1760's. His argument has two parts, or he has two arguments: the apparent danger of tyranny is explained and deflated, first by the heir-apparent cycle, and second by the superiority of modern party government. He reaches his conclusion by denying effect to the source of danger usually identified by historians and thoughtful contemporaries, the influence of Bolingbroke — so that he seems, to one critic, to ignore the importance of “ideas.”
Too Many Cooks: British Planning Before Saratoga
Authors: Willcox William B. 
Published: February 2004

The climax in the long story of Britain's blunders during the War of Independence is the campaign of 1777, the planning of which, in Whitehall and New York, was the worst that the British perpetrated in the seven years of hostilities. Their strategy in 1781 was even more disastrous in its outcome, but far more defensible in its design; the strategy of 1777 can scarcely be defended at all. It rested upon premises that many observers at the time recognized to be wildly fallacious, and it brought its due reward — the surrender that led directly to French intervention.The campaign had no unifying concept. An army from Canada advanced by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson toward Albany, where it was supposed to be joined by a small detachment marching down the Mohawk; far to the south a substantial garrison was immobilized on Manhattan, while the main field army attacked Philadelphia by the most roundabout route it could have chosen. The British thus had three armies (ignoring, as they tended to do, their small garrison on Rhode Island), each isolated from the other two; and the Americans were free to concentrate against whichever one they chose. This was dispersion of force carried to the point of absurdity. Why was the absurdity not apparent to the Commander in Chief? to General Burgoyne? to the King's ministers in London? The question has been endlessly debated, and no final answer is possible. But an examination of the men who were principally responsible for the outcome suggests that two major factors were at work.
Edmund Burke: A Generation of Scholarship and Discovery
Authors: Bryant Donald C. 
Published: February 2004

In his essay on “The Reputation of Edmund Burke” Thomas W. Copeland offers a timely analysis of the context and climate of contemporary Burke studies. His remarks suggest also the acceleration in pace of those studies. Current publication relevant to Burke has been noticed for the past four years in theBurke Newsletter. Reporting and reviewing new publication on or near Burke, retailing schemes and dreams and work in progress, and purveying personal news and opinion of students of Burke, theBurke Newsletterresembles in scope theJohnsonian Newsletter, edited by James L. Clifford and John H. Middendorf at Columbia University, which, of course, has for some time kept its readers up to date on the bibliography of the age of Burke and Johnson.Copeland's essay, furthermore, is sufficient counterweight to another recent critical appraisal professedly directed to something of the same purpose – W. T. Laprade's impatient, hostile excursion through a century or more of writing on Burke. Without attempting the detail of theNewsletter, therefore, and without retreading Copeland's ground, the present survey undertakes to provide an account of significant trends and characteristic contributions in Burke studies for roughly the period since World War II. That span of years covers the time, or a little more, that the main body of Burke's papers has been generally open for study. It also includes the time when ideological and socio-political patterns have stimulated resort to the familiar past for spokesmen and scapegoats with whom to undergird and extenuate contemporary controversy.
George Webb Hall and The Agricultural Association
Authors: Spring David , Crosby Travis L. 
Published: February 2004

T. S. Ashton has described the Industrial Revolution in England as a time when the “chimney stacks rose to dwarf the ancient spires.” He has also described it as a time when the voluntary association replaced state initiative in governmental affairs. These two phenomena of modern society – the urban industrial complex and the growth of public opinion – are usually paired. Perhaps it is natural to think of the growth of public opinion as something made possible by the growth of cities.Yet it is known that the Industrial Revolution profoundly affected not only the cities but the countryside as well; that the new technology prompted (among other things) an enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. This is evident in the formation of numerous societies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were devoted to purely agricultural pursuits. With the decline of rural prosperity after 1815, however, there arose societies of a different sort which had as their object not the improvement of farming through better techniques but the improvement of agriculture through political action. Both kinds of society revealed the stirrings of public opinion in the countryside.This essay is concerned with the second type of society, which rose and spread among what are loosely termed the tenant farmers of England. These societies were numerous enough and sufficiently of one mind to take on the character of a movement. The movement was to fail, as agrarian movements are notorious for doing.
James Ramsay MacDonald and the Leadership of the Labour Party, 1918-22*
Authors: Lyman Richard W. 
Published: February 2004

The return of James Ramsay MacDonald from the depths of defeat in 1918 to the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1922 is a dramatic episode in twentieth-century British politics. It has added piquancy because the drama was played in reverse nine years later; indeed, MacDonald's behavior between 1918 and 1922 has usually been seen as a prelude to the “betrayal” of 1931.He owed his election as leader to the support of the Left. Consequently he has been charged with hypocrisy; in the words of Philip Snowden:… MacDonald had been actively canvassing among his friends for support, and he had been especially concerned to get the support of the new Scottish members. During the time that he had been out of Parliament he had contributed a weekly article to the Glasgow Socialist paper Forward, in which he had played up to the Left Wing, an attitude strikingly different from that he had pursued when in the House of Commons in previous Parliaments.Some standard modern accounts repeat Snowden's charge, or make it independently. Even those that do not accuse MacDonald of deliberate deception nevertheless portray the Left as having acted under a misapprehension. The Clyde Members, says Francis Williams, “mistakenly judged him to be much more to the Left than he was and assumed, because of his opposition to the war, that he shared their views of the nature of the class struggle.” G. D. H. Cole agreed: had the I.L.P. understood MacDonald's moderation, “they would not have played the part they did in reinstating him and holding him firm in the leadership of the Labour Party.”
The Irony of English Feudalism
Authors: Hollister C. Warren 
Published: February 2004

Everyone is familiar with the story of how William the Conqueror brought feudalism to England. Despite some recent voices to the contrary, medievalists are for the most part inclined to agree that the Norman Conquest introduced the fief into a previously non-feudal land. Moreover, since feudalism did not arise in England gradually and of its own accord but instead was imposed from above by an all-powerful conqueror, it is usually described as more symmetrical — more “perfect” — than the feudalism of the Continent. One historian, reflecting the views of many others, asserted recently that in the years after 1066 “England became the most perfectly feudal kingdom in the West.”It is well to be wary, however, of too much perfection in an institution such as feudalism. It is always possible that in identifying an institution at a particular point in time and space as “perfect” or “nearly perfect” one is being misled by the surface appearances which usually accompany decay. As institutions become less and less relevant to their societies, they are apt, for a while at least, to assume the appearance of increasing orderliness, increasing selfconscious coherence, increasing formalism. These tendencies have been noted by a number of sociologists and have by no means escaped the attention of Professor Parkinson. To determine whether they apply to the so-called model feudalism of Norman England is both hazardous and difficult, but the effort must be made. So much has been written on the question of whether any real traces of feudalism can be detected in England before the Conquest that it may prove refreshing to scrutinize critically the “ideal” feudal state of post-Conquest times, particularly if it can be shown that Anglo-Norman feudalism was not so perfect after all.
Garrett Mattingly, Historian and Man of Letters
Authors: Wright Louis B. 
Published: February 2004

The last published work of Garrett Mattingly, The “Invincible” Armada and Elizabethan England in the Folger Library series of “Booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilization,” demonstrates his remarkable clarity of perception as a historian and his capacity for presenting fresh and original conclusions based on new factual research. This booklet is by no means a summary of the information in his full-length study, The Armada, published in 1959. On the contrary, it contains several new points of view developed since the publication of the earlier book, and it will stand as a model of succinct historical analysis, written with such ease and charm that a casual reader may not realize that it has far greater significance than many a ponderous tome.Mattingly was in many ways an old-fashioned historian who showed no interest in, or regard for, current fads in historical interpretation. Controversies that mean so much to many would-be revisionists today — and mar so much contemporary historical writing — found no reflection in Mattingly's works. Yet few historians of this generation exceeded him in the quality and quantity of new knowledge that he unearthed and the significance of the interpretations that this knowledge made obvious. Mattingly was a revisionist, but the revisions that he made were based on factual information that nobody else had previously shown the ingenuity or the diligence to discover. Mattingly did not spin an hypothesis from his own brain and then go in search of something to prove it.
No Agonizing Reappraisal
Authors: Mullett Charles F. 
Published: February 2004

Every man, according to Bacon, is a debtor to his profession. Although the historian pays his debt by devotion to truth, unless he has thought about truth as well as worshipped it he may — to adapt a figure from Bishop Berkeley — become a thriving earthworm but he will surely make a sorry historian. So vermiculate a metaphor need not prompt every disciple of Clio to compose a penetrating Idea of History, but it may properly incite him to give life to his facts by evoking the universal while documenting the specific, by preferring insights to formulas, and by recalling that historiographical clichés and historical facts — modern saws and ancient instances — go ill together. If the historian of the ancient world benefits from built-in ignorance, the historian of the modern world suffers from built-in knowledge, not merely because of the mountain of fact but because this very mountain permits him to let a tissue of fact do duty for history. Absence of metaphysics is too high a price for erudition.For some years historians have been revolting against easy generalizations and after-mindedness. Their revolt does not find expression in systems, which carry farthest the very practices exciting revolt, but in analysis of assumptions. The critical historian explores his topic in its own terms, not in terms of later dogmas; he reconstructs ideas and institutions in their own context, not as the shape of things to come; he considers his characters in their own environment, not as ancestors; he replaces anonymous society and impersonal forces with living men and women.
Samuel Johnson and “Natural Law”
Authors: Greene Donald J. 
Published: February 2004

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.
The London Press and the First Decade of American Independence, 1783-1793
Authors: Ritcheson Charles R. 
Published: February 2004

The years immediately following the War for American Independence have been rightly called the “critical period” in the history of the United States. Internal order, stability, even national existence were the issues of the struggle culminating in the Constitution. The times were critical for the new nation, too, in the regulation of her external affairs. The French attempted to make her a satellite. The Spanish would forbid her the Mississippi. By far the greatest problem in foreign affairs, however, was the reestablishment of peace-time relations with Britain, the erstwhile Mother Country.Anglo-American relations during the decade after the Peace of 1783 have claimed much attention from American historians. Disagreement about internal developments are often bitter; but evaluations of British policy toward the former colonies are remarkably unanimous. Whether “Federalist” or “Jeffersonian,” American writers generally depict Britain as the villain. Beaten in war and vengeful, she manifested “disgust and exultation” at the difficulties which befell the new republic. Seizing upon every occasion to show her “casual contempt,” Britain adopted a policy based on “an intention of humiliating the Americans”; and her subjects plotted “how to punish their former colonies.” The British nation resolved to disregard the Treaty of 1783 with a callousness and a cynicism which made a mockery of their pledged word.Resting upon studies in the voluminous American sources, these judgements and assumptions correctly reflect the convictions of many important Americans of the time. They accord but little, however, with a dispassionate examination of British sources.
Lord Cromer: Practitioner and Philosopher of Imperialism
Authors: Tignor Robert L. 
Published: February 2004

For many Englishmen Lord Cromer was the embodiment of the British imperial tradition. As one who had spent the greater part of his lifetime in the East representing British power and had crowned his career by being virtual ruler of occupied Egypt from 1883 to 1907, he had come increasingly to symbolize the proconsular tradition in British imperialism. His retirement from his post as Consul-General of Egypt had seemed to many the end of an era. Or as the editors of the Living Age had put it:Lord Cromer's was a masterful personality, but the real field of its ascendancy came to lie as the years of his tenure of power lengthened out, rather in England than in Egypt. He became the center of a legend, the typical figure of modern imperialism, which dominated our foreign policy.Thus, to the supporter of an imperial policy he was “the regenerator of Egypt” and “the empire-builder”; and to the anti-imperialists, heirs of the Gladstonian tradition, the suppressor of Egyptian liberties and the tyrant of the East. In the latter years of his administration of Egypt the mere mention of his name in Parliament was enough to touch off a lively debate on the merits of imperialism.Unfortunately, Cromer's reputation as a typical imperialist has obscured the fact that in the early years of his life he was not known for his imperialistic ideals. Quite the contrary, he was considered by others and considered himself a liberal of Gladstonian persuasion.
The Tudor Commonweal and the Sense of Change
Authors: Ferguson Arthur B. 
Published: February 2004

The key to early Renaissance thought in England has often, and rightly, been sought in that twilight zone which is both medieval and modern in character, yet is, in a sense, neither. In that indistinct area the early Tudor view of society expressed in the concept of the “very and true commonweal” constitutes a prominent but equivocal landmark. Any student of the period knows that the idea was conservative, even reactionary in its implications, inspired in large part by a suspicious distaste for the changes that were taking place in early sixteenth-century England. Those, on the other hand, who have read at all carefully the comments made by these same Englishmen on the state of their own society know that they accepted in varying degrees the facts of change, subjected them to an often searching analysis, and in several important instances arrived at constructive policies on the basis of their analysis of social cause. What, then, is one to make of this paradox presented by constructive realism deployed in the cause of a reactionary social ideal, exploration of change conducted within an ostensibly static framework? Perhaps, as with so many aspects of early Renaissance thought, the difficulty is more apparent than real. Perhaps the commonwealth idea was not so nearly static as it appeared. Perhaps, indeed, the traditional formulas in which it ordinarily found expression simply mask a new sense of change, a dawning awareness of social process.Failure to understand the true nature of the ambivalence that seems at times to be built into the thought of the period, failure in particular to allow for the divergence between traditional theory, part of the rich legacy of medieval thought, and fresh attitudes prompted by actual experience in a time of revolutionary change, has too often resulted in failure also to appreciate the significance of the early Tudor pamphleteers and commentators of various sorts who examined their society with an eye both critical and constructive.
English Franchise Reform in the Seventeenth Century
Authors: Bushman Richard L. 
Published: February 2004

The roots of franchise reform in the seventeenth century are of interest to historians both of Britain and of America. In the new world and in England important steps toward democratic suffrage were taken in the first half of the century. The Virginia charter of 1619 granted voting privileges to all adult male inhabitants regardless of property. Later governments qualified this liberality, but an important precedent was established. In England Leveller tracts and the classic Putney Debates aired arguments that bore no immediate practical fruits but that foreshadowed later reforms. Both developments are startling enough to raise urgent questions about origins. Where did such striking innovations come from? Were they altogether unprecedented, or were they, as seems more probable, modifications of already existing ideas about suffrage?In both cases tentative explanations have been proposed. The generous provisions of the Virginia charter have been accounted for by the desire of the colony's sponsors to attract settlers. Unusual political privileges were a lure to draw Englishmen to the new world. The soldiers' insistence on a wider franchise has been attributed to three factors: the confidence they derived from their large role in Cromwell's victories, the logical development of the natural right and contract theory of government, and the democratic impulse implicit in Puritan Independency. Heady with military successes and religious zeal, the soldiers boldly carried the conception of contract to its conclusion and demanded that Parliament be elected by the people to whom it was theoretically responsible.