The theme of violence in Chartism has always attracted historians. To a large extent, although less so recently, they have accepted the Chartists' division of themselves into advocates of “moral” and “physical” force. Historical writers have found a ready supply of stirring quotes in Chartist speeches to illustrate the passions of a people aroused. And they have dwelt on the actual and potential demonstrations of violence with a lingering fascination. Yet, in all this discussion there has been little systematic examination of the phenomenon of violence in Chartism or any attempt to assess its relative degree of intensity. True enough, recent study by George Rudé on protest and crime in the first half of the nineteenth century has been illuminating, and Dorothy Thompson provided some stimulating analysis in the introduction to The Early Chartists. But no full scale study of the role of violence yet exists.

A helpful move in that direction was made recently in an article by Thomas Milton Kemnitz on the variety of Chartist strategies. Alongside the traditionally recognized policies of moral and physical force, Kemnitz argues that there was a third strategy of intimidation through “the language of menace.” Its chief practitioner, he suggests, was Feargus O'Connor, who modelled his Chartist agitation on experience with Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. Although Kemnitz presents no explicit evidence that O'Connor consciously adopted a course which stood midway between moral and physical force, it is certainly demonstrable that the effects of O'Connor's actions were psychologically rather than physically coercive. Kemnitz assists us when he suggests that we think of Chartist pressure in terms of gradations of coercion rather than just two alternatives.

Current knowledge of politics during the coalition government headed by William Pitt between July, 1794 and March, 1801 resembles a fen set amid drained lands, in that neither ministerial relations within the executive nor the internal affairs of the opposition have attracted much recent attention. For the government, such attention has been directed toward questions of foreign policy and of the motives and effects of the domestic repression. For the Foxites, a relative paucity of materials and the fact of the 1797 secession have conspired substantially to halt scholarly concern at 1794. I have elsewhere attempted to redress somewhat the latter state of affairs. In this essay I propose to deal with two interrelated topics of wartime politics during Pitt's government; the nexus of allegiances among the ministers, and some procedural aspects of executive decision-making. The first, centering upon the specific question of the degeneration of the Portland Whigs, also throws some additional light on the formation of the coalition ministry; the second, attending to restrictions on participation and information and their effects on the subtle dialectic between George III and his ministers, can further explicate the fall of the government.

Undoubtedly, the most visible aspects of the anti-Poor Law movement were the attacks on the workhouse system and the centralized control (more apparent than real) of the Poor Law Commissioners. These were highly emotional issues capable of galvanizing thousands of men and women into dramatic and sometimes violent encounters with government, armed with righteous denunciations of the “Poor Man's Robbery Bill,” the “Bastilles,” and the “Three Bashaws of Somerset House.” But there was another facet to the opposition to the New Poor Law which has received scant attention from historians—the fight against the blatantly undemocratic electoral system created by the act. This article examines the nature of that system and the sporadic attempts to reform it during a sixty-year period, culminating in the radical reforms made by the Local Government Act of 1894.

The constitution and electoral system of the Boards of Guardians were vital components of the New Poor Law, which ensured the dominance of many Poor Law Unions by landed magnates. The key provisions were plural votes for landowners and occupiers for elected guardians, and ex-officio membership of the boards for county magistrates. The landowner's franchise was taken directly from William Sturges-Bourne's Select Vestries Act of 1818, which conferred one vote for land of £50 annual value, and an additional vote for each £25 beyond this, to a maximum of six. A separate occupier franchise was in force until 1844. It gave one vote for land valued up to £200, two votes for land of £200 to £400, and three votes for land over £400, and was the result of a compromise.

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.”

In preparing the Vita Ædwardi Regis…, the First Latin Life of King Edward the Confessor, for its convenient modern edition, Frank Barlow has subdivided the work into two internal “books,” which he sees as very loosely connected, to which he assigns dates of 1065-6 and 1067 respectively, and for which he editorially supplies the subtitles: Book I “Queen Edith's Family,” Book II “Edward's Religious Life.” Much of Barlow's work, not only on The Life but also on the whole subject of Edward and his times, is so good that it is not surprising that this division of the text has been widely accepted: even Sten Körner, who questions Barlow's dating, writes: “The Vita Edwardi is in two parts.…” Nevertheless, viewed in the light of this two book theory, the “work” remains, as Barlow has recently said, one “we now find most difficult to understand,” partly because we must see its author as changing his literary purpose during the course of the writing. It is my own purpose to show that a closer reading of The Life does not support the conclusion that the work has no internal literary unity and that, once this unity is perceived, both the dating and the evaluating of the text become easier. Indeed, when The Life is seen as one work all written during those “evil times” to which its anonymous author refers, its interest is much enhanced; through it we can then glimpse “Edith, the first gem in the middle of the kingdom,” covertly lamenting the fall of her kinsmen and the tribulation of her land during its first years under the victorious William of Normandy, yet at the same time refusing to believe that there was no future for the kingdom of the English.

Historical orthodoxy has long recognized the fervent belief of the Scottish Covenanters that their successful revolution against Charles I “stood or fell” with that of their brethren in England. Although by the end of 1641 the Godly Party in the northern kingdom had temporarily destroyed the foundations of Stuart government, many of the King's Scottish opponents no more trusted Charles to accept a permanent curtailment of his power than did their English counterparts. Should the King triumph over his enemies in London, it was assumed that backed by the power of a still episcopal England he would quickly attack the revived presbyterian establishment in Scotland. Concurrently, the political revolution—completed in the Scottish Parliament in 1641—would also be reversed, for the connection betweeen the leading Covenanting politicians, led by the Marquis of Argyll, and the reformed Kirk was very close. It should be remembered that while the clerical estate was abolished in the Scottish Parliament, laymen could sit in the General Assembly and participate in the most important decisions of the Church. Indeed, the aristocratic element in the Glasgow Assembly was large and the meeting's attack on episcopacy and the five articles of Perth may in fact have reflected lay opinion more than clerical. Caroline bishops, favored in Scotland as well as in England for high political positions, were unpopular with the Covenanting nobility for whom presbyterian church government not only restored God's True Kirk but also eliminated dangerous secular rivals. To undermine presbyterianism would, therefore, remove much of the strength from the political hand which Argyll had so shrewdly played since allying with the Covenanters in the Glasgow Assembly.

There is a well-established notion among Irish and British historians that local self-government began in Ireland in 1898, when the Local Government Act created the system of elective county councils to replace the old grand jury system in the government of the counties. The grand juries, it is well-known, were instruments of the Irish “landed interest”—the gentry and aristocracy—whose dominance over these bodies was protected by a rigid system of property qualifications and appointing procedures that admitted only trustworthy landowners to the jury seats. Since only the juries were empowered to levy and expend the county tax known as the “cess,” they were therefore also able to dominate the lesser county authorities, the county and baronial presentment sessions, through control of the purse. When the 1898 act abolished this aristocratic system and replaced it with a new system of representative county and district councils, the result was a de facto transfer of power in local government from the old landowning class to the peasantry. This view, which was first promoted by the founders of the 1898 act, has been repeated by numerous historians since then, and for lack of evidence to the contrary it prevails today.

Willian O'Brien, the nationalist M.P. and editor of the Parnellite newspaper United Ireland, might well have disputed this view if he were alive today. As a practicing politician who understood well the ways in which power can be exercised, he was more inclined to look at the practical operations of public bodies rather than their constitutions to determine which party held the real power. In his Recollections, which were published in 1905, O'Brien reminisced about the turbulent years of the great “land war” of 1879-1882 and recalled how, in 1882, that historic struggle between Irish landlord and tenant for control of the soil focused for a time in a struggle for control of the Irish boards of guardians, the 163 bodies which administered the Irish poor law in the localities.

Eighteenth-century British chemistry presents the historian with an interesting paradox. As theorists, the British hardly distinguished themselves. Joseph Black, the foremost professor of chemistry during the second half of the century and a man of great intellectual ability, began his career with a brilliant paper on pneumatic chemistry and then promptly abandoned the world of published research. Skillful investigators such as Stephen Hales and Joseph Priestley made many important discoveries, but the theories they offered as interpretations of their observations created as many difficulties as they resolved. Although British chemists hypothesized with gusto, the aethers and phlogistons they invoked to explain chemical phenomena lacked intellectual as well as physical gravity and historians of chemistry have not yet succeeded in clarifying the relationship between this welter of ideas and Lavoisier's successful recasting of chemical theory during the final decades of the century. Despite the inadequacy of its theoretical concepts, however, philosophical chemistry flourished in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Although the absence of a unifying theory led to a rather undisciplined pattern of growth, the number of chemists actively studying philosophical problems certainly increased. Why did so many natural philosophers become interested in such a theoretically impoverished subject, and why, after two generations of intense investigation and reflection, were they unable to formulate an adequate general theory?

This essay examines the role of Parliament in the formation and conduct of foreign policy after the Restoration. My principal interest has been to see how the Members of the House of Commons viewed that role. I have, therefore, focussed on the parliamentary debates rather than the diplomatic correspondence in order to observe the changes and limits of the parliamentary position.

These limits can be observed initially in a view of the prerogatives of the Crown. Charles II was a francophile king. He loved the country of his mother; he openly admired the absolutism of his cousin, the Sun King; he secretly cherished the Roman Catholic faith which he associated with successful Kingship. Like his model, the King of France, Charles interested himself actively in foreign affairs. Although not remarkable for diligence and industry in many aspects of government, he was a regular attender at the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The membership of this group fluctuated at the royal will, but always included the two Secretaries of State. Sir Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, as Secretary of State for Southern Europe, was virtually Minister for Foreign Affairs for about a dozen years. The King, acting with the Secretaries in Committee, instructed diplomats, who negotiated treaties independently of Parliament. The Triple Alliance of 1668, for example, although publicly known, was concluded while Parliament was not in session. Occasionally, Charles II acted without even these intimate advisors. The classic example is the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 whose real provisions were kept even from some members of the Foreign Committee.

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.

David Lloyd George's reputation and political position seemed unassailable in 1918. Lord Beaverbrook, perhaps somewhat extravagantly, wrote of that period:

Not the least praised of all his works during the First World War was the formation between May 1915 and June 1916, of the Ministry of Munitions. In the eyes of many Britons, he had patriotically given up the prestigious and powerful Chancellorship of the Exchequer to take up the burden of munitions production when the shortage of shells and guns seemed to frustrate the British military effort. Some time thereafter the necessary armaments appeared, and the Minister and his associates shared in the popular acclaim. The apparent early success of the Ministry of Munitions helped to propel him from the Munitions Office in Whitehall Gardens to Number 10 Downing Street itself. Peter Lowe has written in his recent evaluation of this episode of Lloyd George's career:

The erosion of his political position after the war and the long period of his eclipse gave opportunity for critics to revise the popular view of the career which had received so much applause.

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.

They were unlikely choices for revolutionaries and hardly the haughty autocrats the phrase “Little Tin Gods” conjures up. Yet many East African district officers felt it their duty to change the lives of the Africans they ruled, and against great odds they did. Sent out by their superiors in London and Nairobi as policemen and tax collectors, they saw themselves as secular missionaries for a superior culture. Working in the decade before the catastrophic first world war, they were the last generation of Europeans who easily believed their own superiority. Under pressure to produce revenue many district commissioners fostered economic development as a first step in reforming African society. They wished to develop an exchange economy based upon the fruits of a settled and productive peasantry working on its own land. They believed the Africans would adopt the basic values of hard work and even self-reliance, making an Edwardian revolution. If their assumptions about social change, economics, or even civilization itself seem unsophisticated, it is because they were amateurs. They had few resources beyond their own confidence and sense of mission. They began a revolution, but it was not the one they intended for they failed to retrieve colonial Kenya from the clutches of a handful of white settlers. Their vision of peaceful prosperity for the Africans was ultimately denied, and the hopes they raised became murderous frustrations. They offered Kenya an alternative course which imperialism could not accept.

Kenya's first district officers came from diverse backgrounds, but most shared the middle class values they proposed for the Africans.

Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her stimulating essay, “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham,” examines Bentham's projected prison, the Panopticon, in order to reassess prevalent views of Philosophical Radicalism and its founder. She rightly directs attention to the central importance of the Panopticon in Bentham's doctrine, but her interpretation of its significance is, I believe, wide of the mark.

The major object of Ms. Himmelfarb's essay is to note and explain the extraordinary personal involvement—the obsession—of Bentham with this his most cherished project. Bentham not only waged a battle with Parliament stretching across decades to win acceptance of his plan; but, more importantly, he intended that he himself become the first warden of his novel prison. In later years, he still could not reconcile himself to defeat. Ms. Himmelfarb sees in the warden Bentham's alto ego. Bentham's scheme places the warden, the contract manager, at the literal center of the Panopticon. Invisible and apparently omniscient, all power is vested in him without any formal regulatory authority reserved to the government. The contract manager is absolute within his realm. Ms. Himmelfarb concludes that such a striking departure from conventional penal principles indicates a plan tailored to suit the personal needs and wishes of its author. There is “a poetic Tightness' to Bentham's attempt personally to play the part he had written for himself. Even if this touch were lacking, “one would be tempted to assume” psychological identification. However, Ms. Himmelfarb is able to give only one specific meaning to this identification she so rightly intuits: the Panopticon is a design for the unmitigated economic exploitation of an unfortunate few for the pecuniary advantage of society in general and the warden, Jeremy Bentham, in particular.

Although there is an ever increasing amount of scholarship describing the individual and collective experiences of British women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has been, as yet, little written on the period after 1914. It is not my purpose here to fill that void. Rather it is the aim of this essay to sketch in the most striking features of British women's economic position during the inter-war years. Two interrelated aspects will be stressed: the actual employment of women during the period and the extent of changes in women's traditional economic roles. This essay proceeds on the assumption that pre-war feminism and the increased employment of women during the war heightened women's economic expectations. In post-war Britain, new vistas seemed to be opening as indicated by a flood of legal changes affecting women and as discussed in the analyses of contemporary social commentators. The reality, however, was not altogether encouraging. Employment gains made during the war by skilled and unskilled women in industry evaporated within a few years after 1918. The position of professional women showed some improvement but did not achieve the levels of their earlier hopes. The economic dislocations of the twenties and thirties were in part responsible for the slowness of change, but just as importantly, the accepted economic roles of women underwent no fundamental alterations.