In a journalistic career which spanned seven decades, Henry Noel Brailsford devoted a considerable part of his writing to Russian affairs and to the relations of the British and Russian peoples. In scores of articles and in two books based on first-hand observations, he helped to mold Western attitudes — especially of those on the political Left — to the often maligned, frequently enigmatic giant of the East. Few English journalists in the twentieth century could match the knowledge, personal contacts, and audience of a man who published several articles a week from the late 1890s to the early 1950s for a host of papers, including, to name the most important, the Manchester Guardian, the Speaker, the Daily News, the Nation, the Herald, the New Republic, the New Leader, Reynolds News, and the New Statesman. While Brailsford's field of competence encompassed the whole range of international and imperial affairs, he was preoccupied with the Balkans, with Russia, and with India, and of these only Russia commanded his attention throughout his life. The Balkan question belongs to the years before World War I, India to the 1930s and 1940s, but Russia remained of consuming interest from the revolution of 1905 until after the Second World War.

The investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales was a magnificently staged pageant, as most of the 500 million people who saw it on television will attest. Two hundred thousand pounds went into the making of the extravaganza of July 1, 1969, an event that Queen Elizabeth had promised to her Welsh subjects as far back as 1958, at the close of the Commonwealth Games at Cardiff. But no date had been set for the Caernarvon investiture until July 1, 1967. Predictably, the timing of that announcement has been seen as politically motivated, as a direct response to the emergence of Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) as a threat in two recent by-elections in Wales.

The investiture ceremony was itself a matter of much contention within Wales. Most Welshmen, to the distaste, even disgust, of the minority separatists, welcomed the event: as a royal occasion, a boost to tourism, and as a state celebration in which they, as Welshmen, were to take pride of place. It was to cost too much, true, but then the Welsh are not alone in questioning the cost of maintaining Royalty. And it is true that Charles was an English prince, but he had behaved himself admirably while a student at University College, Aberystwyth, and had even learned some Welsh during his stay in the Principality. He was, in that respect, the first “English” prince of Wales to identify himself with the Welsh in so intimate and endearing a way. Some memories on that July day, 1969, were directed to the first “English” Prince of Wales, a baby son of Edward I who was born at Caernarvon in 1301 and presented to the Welsh as their prince to replace the defeated Llywelyn. Edward II, it turns out, not only grew up to speak no Welsh, but used French more than English as his own language. It is from this precedent that English monarchs have, ever since, named their first-born son and heir Prince of Wales (it is not itself strictly a hereditary title in the sense of being passed from the Prince to his first-born, but reverts to the crown in the event of the Prince's death; nor has there ever been a Princess of Wales).

In recent years there has been considerable interest in Victorian politics and the Victorian political system. This has provided a substantial and continuing literature, much of which, however, remains preoccupied with leadership and organization at a parliamentary level. It may, therefore, be valuable to suggest an area within this most traditional of fields which might provide an alternative approach to that of “high politics”—of cabinet intrigue and parliamentary speech-making. In fact, one might ignore, for the moment, Parliament altogether, and consider that side of Victorian political activity which has been largely obscured by Hatfield dinner parties and Highbury foxing. That is, the manner in which Englishmen from outside Westminster, and perhaps from outside the formal institutions of party and government, attempted to determine the substance of issues and solutions debated in Parliament and at Whitehall.

One should avoid confusing the visible and symbolic place Parliament has occupied with the reality of political initiative. In England the rapid growth of new economies and the cities they created in the North and Midlands at the beginning of the Victorian age detracted from the centralness of London and Westminster, blurring somewhat the focus of English economic and political life, and creating new urban hierarchies consciously opposed to domination from Whitehall. Within the vast new urban centers, fed by a rural migration and accellerated by the spreading railway system, voluntary associations of all sorts became a peculiarly Victorian characteristic—serving perhaps as surrogates for a sense of community lost in the passage from a rural to an urban environment. Reading and corresponding societies, social clubs, self-help and benevolent associations, charities—this kind of activity penetrated Victorian society from the respectable working classes to the very rich. Related to this social phenomenon was a growth in local and national political associations—what one might today call “cause lobbies.” It is this type of pressure group activity, predominantly urban and probably largely middle-class, which needs to be more systematically studied. This essay will attempt to indicate the value of such research into “low politics,” and to suggest some avenues of approach.

On the afternoon of Thursday, the 10th of June 1540, a squad of Yeoman of the Guard burst into the Council Chamber in Westminster Hall, and arrested Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. They escorted him out through a postern to a boat waiting at Westminster Steps, rowed him down the Thames, and through Traitors' Gate into the Tower of London. Within this gaunt prison Cromwell was held till the early morning of July 28th, when the Yeoman marched him to Tower Hill to be executed for treason, heresy, bribery, and misuse of power. He climbed the scaffold, and addressed the crowd. He had come here to die, he confessed, and not to justify himself. He was a grievous wretch, who sought God's pardon. He had offended the King, and asked the crowd to pray that Henry VIII would forgive him. Finally, Cromwell insisted that he would die a Catholic, and that he had never waivered in a single article of the Catholic faith. Then, after a short prayer commending his soul to the Almighty, Cromwell laid his head on the block, and, as John Foxe records, “patiently suffered the stroke of the axe” swung “by a ragged and butcherly miser [who] very ungodly performed the office.”

So died one of England's greatest statesmen—the architect of the Reformation and the Tudor Revolution in Government. Just as his career has been the source of much historical debate, the events of the last seven weeks of his life, from his arrest to his execution, and his scaffold address especially, have been an irritant of contradiction and confusion.

In 1934, There appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature a poem entitled, “Audenspender.”

Indeed, the two Oxford poets, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, became acknowledged leaders of a “movement” in English poetry in the 1930's. Other writers associated with the “movement” were Michael Roberts, John Lehmann, Rex Warner, Julian Symons, William Empson, William Plomer, Julian Bell, Charles Madge, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward, and Christopher Isherwood. The “movement,” whose members were variously appelled the “Thirties poets,” the “new poets,” the “Oxford Group,” and the “New Signatures poets,” was not an organized, formal movement and its so-called members did not consider themselves a “school” of poets and not all of them went to Oxford.