Showing papers in "The Historical Journal in 1974"

The Newspaper Press in the Reign of William III

Abstract: Although it is not free from errors in detail, one of the considerable merits of Macaulay's History of England is the attention it gives to the newspaper Press and to the effects of the Licensing Act and of its expiry in 1695. More recently Dr de Beer has provided an admirable but brief account of the period from 1695 to 1702, but these explorations have served to open up rather than to exhaust the subject. In the present article also some interesting and important topics will have to be neglected, such as the advertisements in newspapers, the publication of literary and trade journals, and the politics behind die discontinuance of the Licensing Act in 1695.

The Formulation of the Declaration of Rights

Abstract: After a period of comparative neglect, historians are re-examining the English Revolution of 1688 with revived interest and revised interpretation. In the past few decades numerous works have carefully re-investigated and often reinterpreted the roles played by such disparate groups as the Whigs, die nobility, the common people, and die urban mob, as well as by such leading individuals as die Earl of Sunderland, James II, and William of Orange. They have broadened our perspective of the Revolution by placing it in die wider context of European affairs and have persuasively demonstrated that die replacement of James II by William and Mary was justified most frequently and effectively not by John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, which was indeed composed prior to 1688, but by mat old relic from James I's reign, divine right of kings.

Capital, Government and Politics in the Transvaal, 1900–1907: A Revision and a Reversion 1

Abstract: Over seventy years ago J. A. Hobson put forward the theory that the Anglo-Boer War had been created by the Rand mining magnates and their financial allies, in their search for increased profits. Subsequently this interpretation was extended to the immediate post-war period of British Crown Colony administration, for it was argued that the politics of the post-war period were equally dominated by the Rand mining magnates. More recently, increasing doubt has been cast on this interpretation, for it has been found, inter alia, that the idea of the mining industry engaged in politics as a coherent and monolithic group did not accord with the great variety of behaviour to be found in practice amongst the mining magnates. In the 1960s, however, an attempt was made to overcome this weakness and to return to a strictly economic interpretation of the period, by grafting on to Hobson's basic interpretation the concept of financially-based rivalry between conflicting groups of mining magnates as the key to Transvaal political divisions.

The French Colonial Party and French Colonial War Aims, 1914–1918*

Abstract: For the first two years of the war the French government drew up no programme of its war aims. When the cabinet began to consider its aims in Europe during the summer of 1916, it still avoided serious discussion of war aims overseas. Faced with the overwhelming preoccupations of the Western Front, the government paid little heed to the future of the Empire. Such war aims as France possessed outside Europe by the time of the armistice were arrived at in two ways: first, by ad hoc agreenebts with her allies in the Middle East and in West Africa, agreements forced on the government by the course of the war; secondly, by a commission d'etude established in 1918 to prepare for the peace conference, a commission from which ministers were excluded. The colonial war aims that emerged in these two separate ways were the product not of the French cabinet but of the parti colonial and its sympathizers within the foreign and colonial ministries.

Lloyd George and the 1918 Irish Conscription Crisis

Abstract: David Lloyd George was a great war-time prime minister. There seems to be little doubt about this, but his was leadership has been so extolled by his supporters that adverse criticism sometimes smacks of heresy. Nevertheless criticism is warranted which, whilst not attacking the man, will qualify the myth. What follows is a critical examiniation of Lloyd George and his Irish policy in 1918.

Public Finance and Political Stability: The Administration of the Land Tax, 1688–1720

Abstract: Two major themes have been orchestrated in the course of recent research into the period 1688 to 1714. In the sphere of politics, die extent and intensity of party conflict, especially in Anne's reign, has been laid bare in the work of G. Holmes and W. A. Speck, among others; whilst J. H. Plumb, in The Growth of Political Stability has sketched the motive forces behind the spreading and then the quieting, of that conflict.1 In the second recently developed area, that of public financ , P. G. M. Dickson's The Financial Revolution in England has provided us with the insights and precision necessary to qualify and confirm previous assertions about the substantial contribution made by the developing ‘funding system’ to the success of England, under William and then Marlborough, in holding off Louis XIV, and, consequently, in establishing the Hanoverian dynasty on the throne.2

Child Workers in the Pillow Lace and Straw Plait Trades of Victorian Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire

Abstract: Although for most country girls in Victorian England the choice of work outside the home was limited to domestic service, there were certain areas to which this did not apply. In some cases the reason lay in the existence of competing employment in local factories or workshops - so that in Lancashire (taking rural and urban districts together) about one in four girls aged between ten and fifteen were employed in cotton manufacture at the time of the 1871 Census of Population. But in other places, the cause was the continued survival of a cottage industry in which child labour played a significant role and where ‘a wellordered family [could] obtain as much or more than the husband who [was] at work on [a] neighbouring farm’ This latter circumstance applied to the counties of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, where particularly during the first half of Queen Victoria's reign the pillow lace and straw plait trades were of considerable importance - the latter being organized primarily to meet the needs of the hat industry of Luton and Dunstable. Table 1 shows the size of the work force as recorded in the Census Reports of 1851,1861 and 1871. Nevertheless, these figures are probably an under-estimate of the true position, since many of the women and children working only on a part-time basis did not bother to declare their occupation to the Census enumerator.

Influence, Parties and the Constitution: Changing Attitudes, 1783–1832

Abstract: The existence of royal ‘influence’ was central to the political system of eighteenth-century England. However, the influence of the Crown occupies a curiously tangential place in the political thought of the period. Always difficult to ignore, influence gained recognition chiefly from those groups intent on destroying it – the Old-Whig enemies of corruption, the Country opposition to Walpole and the radical reformers late in the century. But the constant ambiguity as to the exact nature of the balance of the constitution may be explained primarily by the presence of opposed views about influence. While the numerous enemies of influence seem to have had their way in the law-books and other standard accounts of die constitution, an interpretation of British government, leaning more to realism than to legalism, sometimes surfaced in those ministerialists who defended places for M.P.s as the essential lubricant to die machinery. A realistic assessment of influence not only departed from die model of three equal and independent estates, it was also to provide a basis for understanding political parties within the framework of the balanced constitution.

Norman Angell and The Great Illusion: An Episode In Pre-1914 Pacifism

Abstract: On 11 January 1910 Lord Esher, a permanent non-government member of the Committee of Imperial Defence and a close confidant of King Edward VII, dispatched these encouraging words to a relatively unknown journalist: ‘Your book can be as epoch making as Seeley's Expansion of England or Mahan's Sea Power. It is sent forth at the right psychological moment, and wants to be followed up.’ The recipient of the letter, a Mr Ralph Lane (better known under the pseudonym of Norman Angell), had just begun to receive recognition for his small monograph, Europe's Optical Illusion, later revised and expanded into its more celebrated version, The Great Illusion. Esher's words were prophetic. The Great Illusion ran into numerous editions: it sold over two million copies from 1910 to 1913, in 1939 over half a million, and was translated into twenty-five languages.

The Origins of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ in English Political Language

Abstract: Although ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are among the most historic words in the language of English politics, their origins have never been subjected to modern scholarly study. Modern historians of the Exclusion Crisis are attracted by other aspects of the period; we find in the words little of die immediate relevance or historical continuity which Macaulay saw when he wrote glowingly of ‘two nicknames which, diough originally given in insult, were soon assumed with pride, which are still in daily use, which have spread as widely as the English race, and which will last as long as the English literature’.

The ‘Hungry Forties’ and the New Poor Law: a Case Study

Abstract: For well over a century the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the so-called New Poor Law, has been die centre of controversy. Just as contemporaries were drawn into bitter conflict over die measure, modern scholars have continued to debate die degree of ‘cruelty’ engendered in this novel poor relief scheme. The records of die individual poor law unions, however, reveal so many variations in administrative practices as to render invalid nearly all generalizations regarding me operation of die Act. The most obvious difficulty arises over the disparity between Poor Law Commission policy, ostensibly founded upon the recommendations of the famous Royal Commission report of 1834,3 and its actual implementation by the commissioners at Somerset House and their assistants in the field. It is by now a commonplace of poor law history that the commissioners, despite opposition from their secretary, Edwin Chadwick, pursued different policies in various parts of England.4 As we shall see, moreover, the commissioners often held certain provisions of their directives in abeyance, leaving their implementation to the discretion of provincial administrators.

Influence, Power, and the Policy Process: The Case of Franz Ferdinand, 1906–1914 *

Abstract: The death of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo galvanized the Habsburg monarchy into its most fateful decision: the initiation of local war against Serbia. His demise, among other things, ensured Berlin's fidelity to its alliance commitment, convinced (mistakenly) the decision-makers in Vienna that monarchical solidarity would keep Russia in check, and allowed the Hungarians to breathe more easily. But the heir apparent's death may also have had an importance generally overlooked in analyzing the crisis of July 1914.1 Put simply, his disappearance suddenly altered the decision-making processes of the Habsburg monarchy. The elaborate consultative procedures involving the archduke, his military chancellery, and advisers were abruptly terminated. No longer did the joint ministers, the national ministers, the military hierarchy or the emperor's court officials have to consider the archduke and his strong, often peaceful, views on foreign policy. Even Franz Joseph was now spared the irritation of having to explain a decision to his insistent nephew. Sarajevo thus not only supplied the occasion for Vienna's decision for war, it helped, by drastically revising the political process, to accelerate that decision.

The Waltham Blacks and the Black Act

Abstract: The measure of 1723 known as the ‘Waldiam Black Act’ (9 Geo. I, c. 22) has acquired a lasting notoriety. Lecky called it ‘a special and most sanguinary law’, and even Sir Leon Radzinowicz finds it ‘remarkable’ as the most severe legislation of the eighteenth century, its comprehensive nature making it an ‘ideological index’ to the capital laws at large. The Act was extended for five years in 1725 (12 Geo. I, c. 30), amended in 1754 (27 Geo. II, c. 15) and made permanent in 1758 (31 Geo. II, c. 42). Effectively it survived for a century, until Peel took it off the statute book despite opposition from the Quarterly Review. Its main provisions were directed against ‘wicked and evil-disposed Persons going armed in Disguise, and doing Injuries and Violences to die Persons and Properties of his Majesty's Subjects’. It became a felony without benefit of clergy to go abroad into woods in any form of disguise or with a blackened face. Commission of a specific act of destruction or larceny was not necessary for a prosecution to lie.

Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England

Abstract: Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

Direction and Purpose in British Imperial Policy, 1783–1801

Abstract: Since the publication in 1952 of the first volume of V. T. Harlow's The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, the debate on the nature and concept of empire in the twenty years after the American war of independence has focused on the questions of motivation and direction in imperial expansion. Harlow himself established the terms of the debate. The hiatus which traditional historiography had established in colonial affairs as a consequence of American independence, was swept away to be replaced with a set of themes appropriate to an empire which was undergoing continuous change after the Seven Years War. Two of these diemes in particular have caught the imagination of historians. As trouble and disenchantment spread in the colonies across the Atlantic, there was a marked swing in imperial direction towards die east – to Asia and the Pacific – where the second empire was to have its core. But the change was not only one of direction. The new empire reflected a revulsion against colonization and a clear preference for trade over dominion.

Protector Somerset and Requests

Abstract: It is commonly thought that one of the ways in which Protector Somerset expressed his idealistic consideration for the lower orders was by his involvement with a court of requests - either a private court supposedly established in his own house, or the official court of requests - which he used not merely to safeguard against injustice but also to implement social views out of keeping with the aristocratic assumptions of the age, particularly in the interests of agrarian reform. This paper examines the evidence for the existence of a private court and for Somerset's connexion with the official court. Its aim is to question the persisting view, to redefine the Protector's social concerns and to illuminate the operation of Requests in the early years of Edward VI's reign.

The Foreign Office Reforms, 1919–21

Abstract: Little has been written about the Foreign Office reforms of 1919. Contemporaries hoped that war-time experiences would lead to a massive overhaul of the whole diplomatic machine. Radical critics, in particular, were vehement in their insistence that the diplomatic and foreign-policy-making process and the diplomatic services should be subjected to ‘democratic’ oversight and control. Even the less radical reformers believed that the transition from war to peace would provide the opportunity for modernizing and rationalizing the existing administrative system. Yet the changes introduced in the years of peace proved to be less decisive than any of these men intended. The difficulty arose from the sheer number of problems to be solved, a confusion of aims among those responsible for reform, financial considerations and a sharp diminution in public interest and pressure after 1919.

The Bishops and the Act of Exchange of 1559

Abstract: It is well known that the Tudor monarchs exerted highly effective control over the financial resources of the English Church, particularly in the years after the Henrician Reformation. So marked a feature of the sixteenth century were the demands which the Crown, followed by the rest of the leading laity, made upon the Church in order to gain easy profit, that the period has on occasions been characterized as the ‘ age of plunder ’ The dissolution of the monasteries, and its economic and social consequences, have long been the subject of scholarly attention and debate. The fortunes of the secular church, in contrast, have roused relatively little interest, except as a background to the Laudian revival. This is, of course, in part because the crisis which the parochial clergy, cathedral chapters and bishops, experienced, was less dramatic than that of the monks and chantry priests, and, perhaps partly because demands upon the secular church were often for taxation rather than for outright gifts of lands. None of the Tudors showed the slightest inclination to disturb the fundamental tithe relationship within the parishes, and there were very few, even among the most ardent advocates of reform, who spoke openly for the old Lollard concept of making tithe dependent upon the quality of the incumbent.

British Parliamentary Politics, 1784–1786

Abstract: The triumph of Pitt's ministry in 1784 over the Fox-North Coalition is a familiar event in British political history. But the consolidation of the ministry after 1784 has yet to be analyzed in detail. Though the general election of 1784, accompanied by spectacular demonstrations of public opinion in support of the government, clinched Pitt's victory, there was no immediate return to tranquillity. Within two years, Pitt was defeated on four major issues: the Westminster scrutiny, the Irish Resolutions, parliamentary reform, and the duke of Richmond's scheme for the fortification of the dockyards.

’The Basque Ulster’: Navarre and the Basque Autonomy Question under the Spanish Second Republic

Abstract: The Spanish Civil War, as Stanley Payne has recently pointed out, was also a civil war between Spanish Basques. On the side of the Spanish Republic was the tiny and shortlived Basque Republic of Euzkadi, limited to the coastal provinces of Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa where Basque Nationalism had its stronghold; on that of the insurgents were the inland provinces of Alava and Navarre, dominated politically by the ultra-conservative, monarchist and rabidly Catholic Carlists. In a war notorious for the bitterness of its fighting, some of the most bitter took place along the front formed by the Basque mountains, now a political as well as a physical barrier dividing the Basque country. Basque Carlists seized in Vizcaya and Guipuzcoa were imprisoned and executed as enemies of Euzkadi; in Navarre and Alava, Basque Nationalists met a similar fate as traitors to Spain; and when Guipuzcoa was overrun by a predominantly Carlist invading army from Navarre, it was treated as conquered and occupied territory, part of its area actually being claimed for a Navarrese ‘corridor’ to the sea.

British Opinion, Ireland, and the War, 1916–1918

Abstract: In the January 1916 issue of the Nineteenth Century the Reverend Robert H. Murray contributed the first of two articles on Irish insurrectionary movements during the wars with France at the end of the eighteenth century. He prefaced his text with some homilies directed at the British government of his ow n time:During the early months of the present War the prospects of the invasion of these islands by sea as well as by air were discussed and prepared for by naval and military authorities. As the struggle developed month by month there has been less discussion of such contingencies. The magnificent work of our Fleet has lulled us into a complete sense of security. We do not foresee an attack upon the East Coast of England: we have almost forgotten our fears with regard to the West Coast of Ireland.

Peasants and Revolutionaries in Venice and the Veneto, 1848

Abstract: One of the central problems that needs careful analysis and explanation by any historian of the revolutions of 1848 is that of the failure throughout Europe of the predominantly urban, middle-class revolutionary governments to secure tiie support of the peasant masses. With the notable exception of die alliance that Kossuth formed between Magyar peasants and gentry, which resulted in die heroic resistance of the Hungarians until late in 1849, there seems little evidence of die peasantry being won wholeheartedly to die revolution. In fact, far from a repetition of the Jacobin model of 1793–4, the more familiar pattern emerges of counter-revolutionary armies, composed largely of peasantry, destroying die urban revolutions. Peasants from every part of Europe made up the armies of Windischgratz, Radetzky, Haynau and Paskievitsch which crushed Prague, Milan, Vienna, Budapest and ultimately Venice. Little or no support came from the German countryside for the dying Frankfurt Assembly in the spring of 1849; and, in the rather different conditions of France, the ballot box army from the rural areas in April and December 1848 dealt fatal blows to the aspirations of the Parisian revolution. In most of the great cities of Europe, the middle class had some limited measure of success in gaining and keeping the urban poor on their side. It was this alliance, after all, between the advanced sections of the bourgeoisie and the rapidly expanding lower classes of the cities, that was principally responsible for the toppling of so many of the Restoration governments in February and March 1848. But in a largely pre-industrial society, as Europe was at this time, the peasantry still formed the vast mass of the population, and could rightly be seen to be the arbiters of the bourgeois revolution.

Asquith, Bonar Law and the First Coalition

Abstract: The debate over the reasons for the establishment of the Coalition Government in May 1915 continues to resist a conclusion despite the use of new collections of private papers. Unless the papers not so far available to researchers happen to contain an unusually convincing letter in the hand of one of the three mens responsible for the decision, this question seems well placed to defy solution indefinitely. It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to attempt a clarification of the immediate causes by taking a slightly wider perspective than is normally done. In this way one can recognize the Coalition of 1915 for what in essence it was, an attempt to avoid a ‘ Khaki Election ’ on the pattern of 1900.