Authorities on John Bunyan have traditionally failed to associate him with the radical millenarians known as the Fifth Monarchists. Only William York Tindall, in an analysis of Bunyan's millenarian principles, suggested their affinity with the views of the Fifth Monarchy Men. There is, however, an unnoticed passage in one of Bunyan's own works which indicates that he was at one time an adherent of Fifth Monarchist ideology. The work in question, The Advocateship of Jesus Christ (more commonly known under the second-issue title, The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate), was published in May 1688, shortly before Bunyan's death. Unlike several of his posthumous works, this book was not concerned with millenarian themes but with Christ's role as an attorney who pleaded the cause of the elect before God the supreme judge. Nevertheless, near the end of this work Bunyan recalled that “I did use to be much taken with one Sect of Christians, for that it was usually their way, when they made mention of the Name of Jesus, to call him, The blessed King of Glory”. Upon reflection—in a climate charged with tension as hostility to James II mounted—Bunyan calmly observed that ”Christians should do thus; ‘twould do them good.” He was not, of course, suggesting a revival of the Fifth Monarchy movement, but reminding his readers that their ultimate sovereign was Christ, not James II.

The passage is not important for its relevance to political conditions in 1688 but for its indication that Bunyan had once apparently been a disciple of the Fifth Monarchists, a fact not hitherto known. Unfortunately, he did not indicate at what point in his career he was attracted to these people, but it was either the period between his conversion in 1653 and his imprisonment seven years later, or the period from about the publication of The Holy War in 1682 to the collapse of the Fifth Monarchy movement in 1685.

Lord Clarendon created his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England by conflating a narrative history of the struggle between king and parliament which he had written between 1646 and 1648 with an autobiography, covering his life and times up to the Restoration, which he had composed—between 1668 and 1670—after his removal as Lord Chancellor and subsequent exile to France. The finished History, probably completed in 1672, tended—insofar as it was drawn from the autobiography—to be an apology for Clarendon's political career, his autobiographical work begun after completing the History and covering the years after the return of Charles II being unabashedly apologetical. To the extent that the History was drawn from the earlier, narrative history, however, it tended to be analytical rather than apologetical in nature. The original history, according to Sir Charles Firth, “was written with a definite practical purpose: [Clarendon] undertook not only to relate the events of the Rebellion and the causes which produced it, but to point out the errors of policy committed on the King's side. The trusty few who read it would learn from it how to avoid like errors in the future. …” This first version of the later History, however, contained not merely an analysis of the mistakes made by the king and his ministers, but also certain indications as to what were the motives and methods of those who had entered into rebellion against Charles I. Clarendon's conception of the opposition to the king, which was born in the propaganda tracts which he began writing for the king late in 1641 and which he expanded upon and refined in his later political and historical works, did not take the form of a general theory of the rebellion. General theories were not really Clarendon's style. He was an accomplished polemicist with a facility for dealing with matters of theory, but his instincts were those of a narrative historian.

In the sense that myth is a reordering of various random elements into an intelligible, useful pattern, a structuring of the past in terms of present priorities, nineteenth-century Englishmen were inveterate myth-makers. As liberal and scientific thought shook the foundations of belief, the Victorians erected gothic spires as monuments to a medieval order of supposedly simple, strong faith. While their industrial masses languished, they extolled the virtues of self-made men. Confronted with foreign competitors and rebellious colonials, they instinctively asserted the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. In classic myth-making style, the Victorians set about “reorganizing traditional components in the face of new circumstances or, correlatively, in reorganizing new, imported components in the light of tradition.”

Myth not only serves self-validating ends; it also provides a cohesive rationale, a fulcrum propelling people towards great achievements. If the Victorians were confident and self-congratulatory, they had cause to be: their material, intellectual, and political accomplishments were many. Not the least of their successes was in the sphere of sports and games, a subject often ignored by historians. Especially in the development of ball games—Association and Rugby football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf—the Victorians modernized old games, created new ones, and exported them all to the four corners of the earth. Stereotyped as overly-serious folk, they in fact “taught the world to play.”

Since sport, more than most forms of human activity, lends itself to myth-making, it is not surprising to find a myth emerging among the late-Victorians having to do with the origins of Rugby football. Like baseball's Doubleday myth, the tale of William Webb Ellis inspiring the distinctive game of rugby is a period piece, reflecting more of the era which gave it birth than of the event to which it referred.

The emigration of women to South Africa and the other parts of the empire had been periodically promoted throughout the nineteenth century, but it was that great imperial crisis known as the Boer War which gave such emigration an immediate political and patriotic importance. The emigration of women, especially single women, was increasingly viewed not only as a means of assisting unfortunate, superfluous individuals but as a way of strengthening the empire—a matter of imperial urgency. By 1901 the issue of female emigration had become a part, and some argued the most important part, of the larger question of how to secure the South African colonies to the British Empire in more than name. An organized program for sending single women to South Africa was therefore jointly developed by the Colonial Office and the emigration societies which had long been interested in this work. This alliance between the hard-nosed bureaucrats of Downing Street and the amateurish gentlewomen who ran such organizations as the British Women's Emigration Association seldom, as events proved, operated smoothly, contributing in part to its limited success. This attempt to stimulate the settlement of women in South Africa is important, however, in illustrating the national mood in the aftermath of the victory in South Africa, the increased involvements of women in imperial affairs, and the difficulties facing the advocates of female emigration.

The origins of Joseph Chamberlain's, and hence the Colonial Office's, interest in female emigration is difficult to pinpoint. The preliminary report of 1900 of the Lands Settlement Commission chaired by H.O. Arnold-Forster drew the attention of the office to the demographic weakness of the British position in South Africa.