Showing papers in "The Historical Journal in 1988"

‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church

Abstract: Modern historians have been more confident than Restoration Englishmen in stating who the ‘latitudinarians’ were, what they held and where they dwelt. The ‘latitudinarians’ have been described as ‘the central force in the movement toward toleration which came from within the Restoration Church of England’ and as a clerical third force, neither anglican nor puritan, but united in an advocacy of ‘natural theology and rational Christianity’. Their ‘basic convictions’, as summarized by Professor Margaret Jacob, were thatrational argumentation and not faith is the final arbiter of Christian belief and dogma; scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are the most reliable means of explaining creation; and political and ecclesiastical moderation are the only realistic means by which the Reformation will be accomplished.

Whig History and Present-centred History*

Abstract: Of the many books written by the late Herbert Butterfield, the most influential by far was The whig interpretation of history. The importance of that essay is not just that it attained the status of a classic in Butterfield's own lifetime, and has continued to be reprinted for over fifty years. Its main significance is that the historical profession in Britain came to accept its polemical terminology. The phrase ‘whig history’ has long been used as a term of historiographical criticism, in such a way as to imply, firstly, that everyone knows what it means, and secondly, that nobody wants to be ‘whiggish’. This usage is much in accordance with Butterfield's intentions: he succeeded in implanting the term in the professional language of historians.

Present-Centred History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge

Abstract: In a previous article, we examined Herbert Butterfield's identification of a certain pattern of anachronism in historical writing, in his classic book The whig interpretation of history (1931). In the decades since that book was originally published, Butterfield's designation has been extended far beyond its original domain of political and religious history. The terms ‘whig history’ and ‘whiggish history’ have passed into the common parlance of historians. This very success, however, has masked a failure to define the nature of such anachronistic writing, its causes and remedies. Such definition is all the more necessary since Butterfield's own attempts were clearly inadequate. Building upon and amending certain tentative formulations of Butterfield's, we defined the root of the anachronistic error as present-centredness: that is, that the historian, in seeking to study, reconstruct and write about the past, is constrained by necessarily starting from the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present.

Property and ‘Virtual Representation’ in Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract: The representative credentials of the unreformed parliament are a subject of enduring historical interest. It is not surprising that much of that interest has focused on the electoral basis of the house of commons. From the beginnings of an organized movement for parliamentary reform and the first systematic investigations of the subject, criticism fastened on the anomalies and inequities of a manifestly outdated franchise. Modern scholarship, emancipated from the bias of whig history, has been less harsh in its judgement, but equally preoccupied with elections and the electorate. Successive studies have demonstrated the vitality of popular electoral politics not merely in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before the onset of so-called oligarchy, but even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when contemporary criticism was at its height.1 One of the unintended consequences of this successful search for the politics of participation has been a tendency to divert attention from the actual working of parliament, except in terms of those periodic crises, and great national issues, which were of manifest importance in the party politics of the day. Yet parliament in the eighteenth century concerned itself with an extraordinary variety of topics, and burdened itself with a remarkable quantity of business. After the revolution of 1688 it met annually for long, and lengthening sessions. It increasingly involved itself in the operations of government and played an ever more important part in the making and revision of law.

Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: The Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637–1641

Abstract: Robert Woodford was an obscure man, the steward of Northampton from 1636 until his death in 1654, whose diary, which covers the period 1637 until 1641, tells us much about how provincial men viewed the growing political crisis which was to culminate in civil war. There are very few sources available from which to assemble a biography of the diarist. He warrants no article in Dictionary of national biography, he is not recorded as having attended either university, nor to have registered at any of the inns of court. In a brief biography, his eldest son Samuel stated that his father was born in 1606, the son of a gentleman, Robert Woodford of Old in Northamptonshire, that ‘he had but Ordinary Education’, and that his ‘meane Fortune’ meant that ‘he could never provide for us in Lands or Money’. He married Hannah, daughter of Robert Hancs, citizen of London, in 1635 at the church of Allhallows-in-the-Wall. The minute book of the Northampton Town Assembly furnishes us with a few brief details of his career as a provincial legal practitioner. In 1636, he was elected steward of the town of Northampton by the good offices of his patron John Reading, the outgoing steward, who relinquished the office in his favour. The climax of his career would seem to have been his appointment as under-sheriff of the county in 1653 until his death in 1654: he remained a provincial lawyer.

Significant Silences in Locke's Two Treatises of Government : Constitutional History, Contract and Law

Abstract: It is increasingly common in modern literary theory to read that a text's meaning must be elicited from the textual ‘possibilities which are not said’. At this level of generality, the proposition applies equally to the interpretation of non-literary as literary texts. In this paper, I shall endeavour to illustrate the usefulness of this approach by considering the meaning of Locke's argument in Two treatises in terms of things which Locke chose not to say. I shall argue two points. First, I shall suggest that many of the controversies which have arisen in recent years about Locke's meaning have suffered because inadequate attention has been paid to the precise character of a number of silences in Locke's argument. The persistence of an inadequate framework for understanding the character of Englishmen's appeals to an original contract, constitutional law and history in the late seventeenth century will occupy my attention here. Second, I shall suggest that attention to the details of Locke's most significant silences can cast light on current controversies about the intellectual status of Locke's argument. In particular, I shall argue that the current tendency to locate Two treatises within a context of coded, conspiratorial politics is mistaken.

1848 and Parliamentary Reform

Abstract: 1848 has gone down in history – or rather in history books – as the year when England was different. In that year a wave of revolution on the Continent overthrew constitutions, premiers and even a dynasty but in England, by contrast, the middle classes rallied round the government and helped it preserve the status quo. This interpretation of 1848 has long been the established orthodoxy amongst historians. Asa Briggs took this view thirty years ago and it has lately been endorsed by F. B. Smith and Henry Weisser. Most recently, John Saville, in his book on 1848, has concluded that events in England ‘demonstrated beyond question and doubt, the complete and solid support of the middling strata to the defence of existing institutions’. He claims that ‘the outstanding feature of 1848 was the mass response to the call for special constables to assist the professional forces of state security’ which reflected a closing of ranks among all property owners. Although some historians, notably David Goodway, have recently stressed the vitality of Chartism in 1848 they have not challenged the traditional view that the movement failed to win concessions from the establishment and soon declined. Thus 1848 in England is generally regarded as a terminal date: the last chapter in the history of Chartism as a major movement. Thereafter Britain experienced a period of conservatism – described by one historian as ‘the mid-Victorian calm’–which lasted until the death of Palmerston in 1865.

‘The inevitable end of a discredited system’? The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895

Abstract: According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?

Public or Private? London, Leather and Legislation in Elizabethan England

Abstract: On the morning of Wednesday, 24 February 1585, a bill ‘for imploying of Landes and Tenementes given to the Maintenance of Highewayes, Bridges etc.’ was read in the house of common for the seond time and committed for consideration by several members that afternoon in the hall of the Middle Temple. The committee decided to introduce a completely new measure which was itself committed after the second reading on 9 March. At one point in these proceedings William Fleetwood, recorder of London, told the lower house that he had advised the bill's promoter to make it ‘a private bill but he would not and therfor he shall see what will come of it’. Undoubtedly irked at this refusal to accept his advice, Fleetwood may have felt some satisfaction when the bill was rejected on its third reading in the lower house. Nevertheless, the bill's promoter had good reason to introduce his measure as a public rather than as a private bill. Private bills were expensive. Fees were payable at every stage, for the reading, committing, engrossing and endorsing such bills, and then, if all went well, fees had to be paid if the promoter wanted the bill printed and thus made public. Besides the cost, private bills stood less chance of getting through both houses of parliament. Not only was there a great risk of one's measure getting swamped by the large number of private bills always introduced in the first few weeks of a session, but it was also frequently asserted that private bills should have low priority on the agenda of parliament.

The Balance Sheet of Empire, 1850–1914 *

Abstract: Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire by Lance Davis and Robert Huttenback is here.' After some ten years in the making and much anticipation on all sides, this event will remind many of how Richard Cobb, writing about Jack Gallagher's coming to Oxford as Beit Professor of Commonwealth History, recalled that for a long time no-one knew whether or not Gallagher had actually arrived in town. Transatlantic connexions and publisher's ability to deliver the goods are not what they used to be. Nevertheless, imperial historians have good cause to be delighted. Not only the willingness of two distinguished American scholars to devote so much time and personal effort to a major project in the study of British overseas expansion, but the interest of the cliometricians and their financial sponsors in providing for it very substantial resources, are welcome pointers to the vitality of the field. Still more important perhaps is the demonstration provided by the book of the central place which the study of British imperial activity should have in the understanding of Britain's metropolitan or domestic history. Recent research clearly demonstrates a tendency towards reintegrating analysis of Britain's colonial and overseas presence with that of the metropole under the umbrella of imperial history. Historians are currently working in several rather different directions. Following John MacKenzie's example, a number are now exploring the implications of the imperial experience for Britain's social and cultural traditions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Peter Cain and A. G. Hopkins are engaged in redefining the nature and development of the British economy, as revealed in the writings of the last decade, and in assessing the contribution which this may have made to the shaping of empire.3

Medicine, property and the law in Britain, 1800-1914.

Abstract: Property, in spite of its solid sound, is an elusive idea. As C. B. MacPherson puts it:The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time… The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve.

‘Unhallowed Wedlocks’: the Regulation of Marriage during the English Revolution

Abstract: Most seventeenth-century English historians and analysts of periods of revolutionary activity, have viewed events in England between 1640 and 1660 as, at most, a failed political revolution which, while it may have temporarily transformed the political institutions of the English state, had little lasting impact on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Repeated emphasis of this fact, however, has tended to obscure another important aspect of these years – the concerted efforts of successive puritan governments during the 1640s and 1650s to make substantial alterations in the accepted cultural norms of seventeenth-century English society. More recently this latter point has been highlighted in the work of historians like John Morrill, who has investigated the attempt to impose an alien presbyterian religious system on the country, and David Underdown, who has described puritan efforts to regularize and restrict the more unruly elements of rural popular culture. They have shown that, although such reformist initiatives were unpopular and often resisted, they nevertheless represented a determined thrust for cultural change, and in the short term were seen by many as a real intrusion and a serious threat to traditional practice.

Aristocracy, Agriculture and Liberalism: the Politics, Finances and Estates of the third Lord Carrington

Abstract: Politicians in the 1880s believed they were introducing ‘democracy’ into Britain and many feared the – possibly revolutionary – challenge it posed to the existing social and political orders. Historians have for some time recognized that the aristocracy continued to play a significant role in each until at least the First World War. The peers' social hegemony, strong institutional position and relative economic security were a formidable combination. Few would now accept Ensor's view that the 1880s witnessed the beginning of ‘the economic dethronement of the landowners’, and that ‘political headship [could not] long survive economic defeat’. The durability of the late-Victorian aristocracy remains, however, a phenomenon more frequently asserted than examined. The peerage was the sum of its individual members; yet the few ‘micro’ studies hitherto published have concentrated on the ‘aristocracy of the aristocracy’ – the elite of wealth and power, mainly dukes, within the peerage. We know little of the mass of peers who were far less favourably placed, suffered real financial difficulties, but whose tenacity and continued sense of purpose were crucial to the peers' ability to survive.

Arthur Henderson and the British Political Crisis of 1931

Abstract: ‘No matter how often it is told, the story remains fantastic’, wrote Margaret Cole in 1956, referring to the British political crisis of a quarter of a century before. It would be rash to make such a comment today, for in recent years sober research has answered many of the more ‘fantastic’ questions. The role of the Labour opposition, though, remains somewhat neglected; most spectacularly, no attempt has been made systematically to analyse the actions and motivations of its leader during the crisis, Arthur Henderson. A reappraisal is both necessary and possible.

Religion and Superstition in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract: Superstition is the religion of others: their credulousness about beliefs we do not share. Religion is the belief in gods that some hold false, behaviour or practice others consider contrary to reason, but that provides a bond (religio) among its votaries. So, religion and superstition are two sides of the same coin at least in the nineteenth-century France with which the books under review occupy themselves. The eighteenth century opened the way to heterodoxy, but only for a minority, most of whom knew or learned the virtues of discretion. But the Revolution sent the church tumbling and, with it, the public disciplines and restraints which kept superstition that is, nonconformity to official religion in its place: in the shadows. After I 8o i, even after i814, Catholicism was no more than the religion of a majority of the French, the church that once enforced it represented one opinion among others. More overtly than ever, at least within living memory, piety took many forms. Chateaubriand had warned that witches' lairs would open when the temples of the Lord were closed. But witches had been around for a long time; and when the temples of the Lord reopened, sorcerers and soothsayers were still around to challenge their offerings, their prophecies and ceremonies. Never, it seems, at least in modern times, were religion and superstition more active in France than during the heyday of irreligion and anticlericalism. Betting on horses that have won, accounts of the age emphasize irreligion and its struggle against traditional beliefs, but pay less heed to widespread religious preoccupations, let alone persistence. We acknowledge the nineteenth century's fascination with religion, from piety to faddishness, but minimize the relevance of an obsessive religious quest. Even historians of mentalite's, myself included, have tended to play down less obvious linkages between broader religious activities, culture and politics. The late-eighteenth-century revival of millenarian beliefs, and the conjunction of millenarianism and mundane politics, offer a good example of the sort of thing we know but gloze. The Revolution of 1789, and even more its brood, had been about changing mankind and altering human nature. Even when it foundered, revolutionary experience suggested a radical transformation in progress, and changes of cosmic significance just around the corner. Apocalyptic speculation was reinforced by circumstance. E. P. Thompson has referred to the chiliasm of despair. There was also, of course, a chiliasm of hope: specific or diffuse, present terror bred hope of future regeneration. Even the persecution of the church suggested the coming of the Joachimite third age. Fourscore years ago, Albert Mathiez described such messianic

Sir Joseph Yorke, Dutch Politics and the Origins of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War

Abstract: At the very end of December 1780 Britain formally broke off diplomatic relations with the Dutch Republic. The war which followed – the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–84 – abruptly ended more than a century of friendship and alliance between the two states. It also proved to be a turning point in the Republic's domestic history: the shattering defeats inflicted by the superior British navy powerfully assisted the development of the Patriot movement, which was to break the mould of Dutch politics during the 1780s.

Malthus on the Prospects for the Labouring Poor

Abstract: In the penultimate chapter of St Matthew's gospel, immediately before the account of the betrayal by Judas, the story is told of a visit which Jesus paid to the house of Simon the leper. As he sat eating a woman came and poured a precious ointment over his head. The disciples were indignant, saying, in the words of King James's bible, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, why trouble ye the woman for she hath wrought a good work upon me? For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always’.

Political Change in Britain, August 1914 to December 1916: Lloyd George Replaces Asquith: the Issues Underlying the Drama

Abstract: On 7 December 1916 David Lloyd George became prime minister, leading the second coalition government of the war. No archival sources of significance remain to be consulted to help explain how and why the particular composition of the new government emerged. A great deal has been written on the first years of the war, from many perspectives, but a satisfactory political history of Asquith's two administrations remains to be crafted. A sustained narrative, set in the appropriate context, which relates the political significance of the issues to the drama of politics, to the way individuals lose office and governments fall, which establishes trends, and measures cumulative effects is still unwritten.

War and Politics in Spain, 1808’1814

Abstract: For most British readers, the Peninsular War is synonymous with the campaigns of Sir John Moore and the duke of Wellington. That this should be the case is hardly surprising in view of the fascination which they have exercised for many historians at the expense of other aspects of the struggle. In defence of such anglocentrism, it might be argued that British involvement was the decisive factor in the war and, further, that without the duke of Wellington the Iberian Peninsula would never have been freed from French domination. That is true enough, but it is also true that Wellington could never have been successful but for the continued resistance of the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Indeed, it is fair to say that without the thousands of Portuguese soldiers who served in his army, and the indirect assistance provided by the Spaniards in pinning down a large proportion of the French forces, the Duke was so outnumbered that he could never have carried the war into Spain at all. Given that Wellington could probably have maintained a British presence in Portugal almost indefinitely, the Spanish contribution is of particular importance. While the British were still bottled up in Portugal during 1810 and 1811, however, the French all but destroyed the basis for Spanish resistance. Had not the Russian campaign intervened to divert Napoleon's attention eastwards, and with it the vital reinforcements that might have completed the French conquest, Spain could conceivably have been subdued. Wellington's victories of 1812 and 1813 would then have been an impossibility.

Policing the Cold War: The Emergence of New Police Structures in Europe 1946–1953

Abstract: We have recently been reminded of the existence of a ‘missing dimension’ in national security affairs, namely the whole question of secret intelligence and clandestine operations. It can also be suggested that the question of internal security has traditionally represented another gap, though one that occurs for very different reasons. Traditionally, secret intelligence was often unavailable as a subject for comment or academic study precisely because of its secrecy. Internal security included some areas of sensitive political surveillance that fell into the same category; but continued across the spectrum to regular uniformed police work, a subject apparently too mundane and obvious for inclusion in accounts of political history. Police of all categories belong, it seems, to social rather than political history – the world of ‘history with the politics left out’.

The Development of Disciplines in the Modern English University

Abstract: In his reading of my essay, 'Nation, duty, character, and confidence: history at Oxford, I850-I9I4', Peter Slee raises some questions about the kinds of evidence that best explain the origin and nature of disciplines within the modern university.' He appears to believe that history teachers at Oxford became increasingly specialized and that they saw their essential function as the teaching of disinterested knowledge and objective methods of historical study. Assuming that the Oxford school of modern history can be explained by the content of its teaching, he relies only on three sets of lecture notes, some examination questions, some Examiner's notebooks, and one examination script.' But it is essential that a wider variety of evidence be read critically within the context of a developing university that was part of national life. Inconsistencies between what was said and what was done and between what was expected and what actually occurred must be recognized and explained. It is necessary but not sufficient to recount the steps by which the university accepted the subject of history as part of the evolving structure of colleges and new university bodies, each of which attempted to regulate teachers and their subject. The story cannot be told adequately without an analysis of the relationship between institutional forms and the broad agreement in Oxford about the greater purposes of the university. The emergence of the modern university of Oxford was informed by a prevalent agreement that new subjects must provide a discipline, in both the widest and narrowest sense, for transforming immature young men into responsible and capable leaders, at home and within the empire.3 Although remarkably autonomous and resilient, the university community was never indifferent to internal debate or to the outside world. History developed at Oxford, from the i850s until at least I914, as an increasingly successful part of the modern English university's national commitment. Knowledge was rarely disinterested.4 History teachers or tutors, as classics teachers

The King in Parlement: The Problem of the Lit De Justice in Sixteenth-Century France

Abstract: ‘You ask me what a Lit de justice is? I will tell you!’ Thus exclaimed Louis-Adrien Le Paige, an eighteenth-century parlementaire who was excoriating the current spectacle of the king's appearance in person in the Grand-Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. Denied their ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation in important affairs of state, which in their view meant an active or participatory role in the legislative process, magistrates like Le Paige felt coerced in 1756 into the passive role of registering policies presented to them as faits accomplis. And thus also opens Professor Sarah Hanley's penetrating and revisionist study of this complex ceremony where monarch and magistrates met together in the legislative arena: the lit de justice. In a tour de force of painstaking scholarship Professor Hanley has convincingly proved that this ceremony, in which the king personally appeared in Parlement and sat on a specially decorated ‘seat of justice’, had evolved out of legend and myth. The lit de justice did not, as generations of parlementaires like Le Paige had claimed, emerge in the middle ages shortly after the creation of the court itself in the late thirteenth century. As Professor Hanley shows, the first such ceremony did not occur until much later, in the reign of Francis I in 1527. More importantly, she demonstrates that at its inception the lit de justice was not associated in any way with the adversarial scene depicted by Le Paige in 1756, with the king forcing his will on a recalcitrant court by making a personal appearance in the Grand-Chambre in order to force the registration of unpopular legislation.

The King, the People and the House of Commons: The Problem of Early Jacobean Purveyance

Abstract: For a brief time at the beginning of James I's reign purveyance appeared as the greatest grievance of the commonwealth, troubling the first two sessions of his first parliament. So much has long been known, but only recently has it been revealed how far the commons thought of going. The bills read in the house in 1604 and 1606, almost certainly identical or nearly so, did not look merely to remedy the abuses of purveyors, but to abolish purveyance itself – the king's right to be served provisions and carriage at prices below those current in the markets – which the house discovered was explicitly prohibited by numerous medieval statutes. The commons' refusal in the two sessions to buy the king out of his prerogative with a ‘composition’ was not then irresponsible, as one historian has suggested. The house could not readily agree to purchase what it had learned the king had no right to sell. The radical challenge to the king's prerogative embodied in the commons' bill, Dr Croft has recently argued, doomed the composition proposed by James's ministers. Instead, the house pursued its claims with ‘remarkable tenacity’, especially in 1606, when it passed the bill twice.