In the autumn and winter of 1546-1547 there was a major change in the distribution of political power in England. A group of leading councillors linked by conservatism were driven from court and council. Some forfeited office, others their freedom, and the Earl of Surrey his life. Bishops Gardiner and Bonner went to gaol. Tunstal suffered the loss of much of his vast liberty of Durham. Great Norfolk lay under sentence of death, in the Tower. Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, was deprived of his office, allegedly for acts ultra vires, and was under house arrest in Ely Place, his London palace. He had also been fined 4,000 pounds, under the sentence given on the 6th of March and the additions to it made on June 29th.

Historians seeking an explanation of the political earthquake have often adopted a simple but attractive thesis. As Henry VIII's life ebbed the balance tipped toward the “Protestants,” perhaps because it was the king's own wish or because there was a secret pact, in fact a conspiracy, between Sir William Paget and Sir Edward Seymour. The chief historians of the transit of power have provided direct evidence supporting the idea of a pact between Paget, the ‘master of Practices,’ and the king's brother-in-law, the military hero Hertford who was also the uncle of Prince Edward.

Since his death in 1950, at the age of forty-six, George Orwell's personal following and literary reputation have grown so steadily that he has become the most widely read English writer of his generation. Orwell's name has come to evoke almost universal recognition as a kind of legendary symbol of resistance to political dishonesty, hypocrisy, and totalitarianism. But in spite of his popularity, he remains a strangely enigmatic figure and a source of continuing controversy among critics and historians.

The initial critical studies of Orwell and his work were often little more than highly partisan attempts to define or dismiss Orwell as an anarchist, a disillusioned socialist, or a conservative reactionary. The shortcomings of this critical approach, which was once virtually an obsession with the politically committed critics of Orwell's generation, have become increasingly obvious. Orwell was one of the most politically “engaged” writers of the twentieth century, but the precise nature of his political posture simply cannot be defined and analyzed within the context of any identifiably modern political ideology, party, or movement. During his politically active years, Orwell enthusiastically supported a wide variety of radical causes and revolutionary reforms, but the political and intellectual conformity demanded by the modern parties of the Left seems always to have been at odds with his well-developed sense of intellectual honesty and personal integrity. As Anthony Powell has observed, “Orwell could never be integrated into any normal party machine. His reputation for integrity might be invoked, his capacity for martyrdom relied on, his talent for pamphleteering made use of, but he could never be trusted not to let some devastatingly unwelcome cat out of the political bag.”

A new topic of controversy was interjected into relations between the English crown and the community of the realm during the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries as a result of large scale purveyancing of victuals, military supplies, and transport to provision a nation at war. The old right of purveyance or prise-taking, which permitted the king, members of his family, royal officials, and the greater nobility to preempt foodstuffs and requisition carriage for their personal use, was transformed into an elaborate mechanism for supplying English armies fighting in Scotland and France. The conflict provoked by this institutional change dominated crown-community relations in England from the latter part of Edward I's reign forward through the reign of Edward II and much of Edward III's. In order to defend private property against royal purveyance, representatives of the community experimented—especially during the period 1297 to 1362—with several methods for restricting the practice. But efforts to regulate purveyance were hindered by the ambiguous nature of the king's right, which could be viewed both as a royal prerogative and as a simple act of buying necessities for the king and his court. Further, depending on its scope and extent, purveyance by the crown could be seen either as a means of provisioning the household alone or as a form of national taxation applicable to the country at large. Occasionally during this period the community equated purveyance with regular taxation and tried to subject it to parliamentary control. Eventually, however, the nation was compelled to accept the view of purveyance as a commercial arrangement between English kings and their subjects based on the more or less legitimate right of the crown to take goods and services by forced loan or under promise of future payment. Accordingly, attempts to regulate it assumed the form of legislation designed to assure the prompt compensation of sellers, the accountability of the king's agents, and the punishment of corruption.

When the officials at the British Treasury sat down to sketch out their proposals for the 1937 budget, they knew that they had a problem. During the previous year the Government had been forced to embark upon a costly five year rearmament program by the massive growth of the German military establishment, and the bills for that program were beginning to fall due. £180 million had been spent for defence in 1936, £60 million more than during the previous year, but £100 million less than the military services estimated would be necessary in 1937. The Services' estimate was in the words of Edward Bridges, a Treasury under-secretary, “a good deal higher than anything which I anticipated in my gloomier moments.” He knew, however, that there was little chance that it would be reduced. The question immediately at hand was where the funds could be found to pay for the burgeoning cost of defence not only in the coming year, but in the years to follow.

Another Treasury under-secretary, Fredrick Phillips, estimated that they could not realistically expect to raise more than £180 million of the £280 million they required from existing taxation. Although the canons of orthodox finance, to which the Treasury usually adhered, dictated that taxes should be increased to meet the deficit, everyone at the Treasury realized that such a measure would extinguish the growing prosperity which the Government had so laboriously and successfully nurtured since the economic collapse of 1931. Reluctantly they decided to resort to the fiscal device which Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had once disparaged as “the broad road that leads to destruction”: borrowing.

There is a critical opinion that Henry James's “Figure in the Carpet” is an ironic story in which the book-reviewer Corvick only pretends to discover a recurrent pattern in the works of a celebrated novelist in order to entice his fiancée, a literary compulsive, to marry him without waiting for her mother to die, the moral being that the search for such patterns does not represent a mature interest in literature. In his preface to the volume containing the story in the New York Edition, however, James replies to critics who demand to know “where on earth, where roundabout us at this hour,” he had found a living model for his pattern-weaving novelist: “As for the all-ingenious ‘Figure in the Carpet,’…nothing would induce me to come into close quarters with you on the correspondence of this anecdote.…All I can at this point say is that if ever I was aware of ground and matter for a significant fable, I was aware of them in that connection.” He adds that the impulse which led him to write the story, far from opposing a search for abstruse themes, was his opposition to the general “mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation—appreciation, to be appreciation, implying, of course, some such rudimentary zeal.…What I most remember of my proper process is the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation.” And in the story itself there is evidence that James intended Corvick to discover an actual pattern in Vereker's novels.