Edward III's foreign ambitions, which in 1337 precipitated the Hundred Years' War, generated such severe financial pressures at home that eventually the fiscal crisis became a political one. Exasperated by the inability or unwillingness of the government of regency under Archbishop Stratford to provide him with money and matériel for his continental campaign, an outraged Edward returned to England on November 30, 1340, determined to purge the government of those corrupt and disloyal officials whom he blamed for his humiliation. The attack on the chief ministers, especially Stratford, who was both primate and principal councillor, created a political crisis of considerable proportions, wherein some dominant issues of medieval English politics — the liberties of the church and clergy and the role of the baronage in political decision-making — were re-stated and re-argued. Modern historians have focused their attention on the more dramatic aspects of the crisis of 1341, particularly its “constitutional” implications. Lapsley, Clarke, and Wilkinson, for instance, examined the conflicts of the king with Stratford and with the baronage — events reminiscent of the confrontations of Henry II with Thomas Becket and of Edward II with the Lancastrians. Tout explained the administrative reforms of the early part of Edward III's reign, which, by subjecting the great offices of state to the control of the king's itinerant household, were designed to transform the administrative system into a device for purveying supplies and cash to feed the English war-machine. More recently, E. B. Fryde has described the ordinary and extraordinary financial techniques employed to subsidize the king's expensive foreign policies.

In this way Sir Edmund Verney, the patriarch of an old Buckinghamshire gentry family, explained his decision to side with the King in the Civil War, a choice which cost him his life at the battle of Edgehill. In 1642, many English gentlemen were confronted with a similar choice. It is significant that Verney attributed his choice of King over Parliament to “honour and gratitude.” In Sir Edmund's explanation we may find the basis on which many English gentlemen supported the King in 1642.

The political behavior of the Royalist gentlemen in the 1640s is part of a problem which has long plagued historians of the English Civil War. The economic interpretations proposed by both R. H. Tawney and H. Trevor-Roper stimulated much interest because they seemed to provide what had long been sought — a theory that could consistently account for the political choices of upper class gentlemen in the 1640s. When tested, however, neither theory proved satisfactory. Careful studies of key institutional bodies like the Civil Service and the Long Parliament revealed no significant social or economic differences between Royalists and Parliamentarians.

It has long been a critical obligation for commentators on the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to remark on Edward Gibbon's failure to explain the reasons for that fall. Historians in particular have been bothered by this: both J. B. Black and D. M. Low have fretted over Gibbon's refusal — or inability — to deal with the ultimate meaning of the events he describes or, in the last three volumes, to “propound and answer questions explicitly.” Readers of the History, on the other hand, may feel that the historian belabors too often the “causes” of events, those “connections in a sequence.” Regularly, Gibbon reminds us that he is dealing with a process of degeneration involving successive stages of decay; and both within individual sections and at the close of units, he carefully recapitulates that the policies of Augustus or Septimius Severus, the strengthening of the Pretorian Guard, the spread of Christianity, the weakening of senatorial authority, monetary and land policies, the invasions of the Goths and Huns were all “causes” for the decline of the Roman Empire.

The contradiction between the reactions of critic and casual reader is merely apparent. His commentators grant that Gibbon assayed explanations for the events he recounted; but, they say, his purported “causes” are not primary or even secondary ones. They claim, in fact, that the explanations seldom account for the single chains of events he describes, much less for the long, intricate process that Gibbon sees as steady and unmitigated decline.

On October 10, 1800, a group of whigs and radicals met in the Shakespeare Tavern to celebrate the anniversary of the first election of Charles James Fox for the city of Westminster. But there was little to be festive about. The speeches, toasts, and songs betrayed a sense of despair tinged with nostalgia. Fox and the Lord Mayor, Thomas Erskine and Lord Bessborough, all toasted “the Memory of the Liberty of the Press” and joined in a song, written for the occasion, which reflected the general disillusionment:

HOW chang'd are the times, and our people of late,
When my brother John Bull has no use for his pate?
A head without tongue ev'ry wise man maintains,
Is just as absurd as a tongue without brains.
Sing ballinamona or a,
No head without tongue then for me.
Fine laws have been made, for the good of the land,
And our heads are now placed where our heels us'd to stand,
Topsy-turvy's the word where fair Order and birth,
And this once land of plenty's now chang'd to a dearth.
Sing ballinamona, &c.
No plenty of starving for me.
But still it is some consolation to think,
How little we need either victuals or drink,
For the Minister's able, who fram'd these wise laws,
Has given to a Justice the key to our jaws.
Sing ballinamona, &c.
No justice to lock jaws for me.
When enslav'd thus the People, the Ministers then
Send to Botany Bay all who dare to complain,
And religion they mock, when we've scanty of meat,
For they publish a Fast, when there's nothing to eat.

“Liberal Imperialism” has been a confusing label ever since the Boer War, when it was first widely applied. It was then a source of controversy within the Liberal party, much of it centering around Lord Rosebery, who introduced the term. Some of his contemporaries considered Liberal Imperialism to be marked by dangerously aggressive policy, while J. A. Spender, who also lived through these years, later interpreted it as a revival of the Palmerstonian spirit. More recently historians have treated it as ideology. Bernard Semmel has called it “social imperialism,” placing its origins in the 1880's. G. R. Searle has argued that many of Rosebery's Liberal Imperialist ideas were part of an ideology of “national efficiency,” a set of ideas that crossed party lines and that emerged in 1900 as a consequence of wartime failures. “Liberal Imperialism” has also been used to refer more generally to the “imperialism” of Liberals before as well as after the outbreak of the Boer War. I shall argue that Liberal Imperialism is best understood, not as ideology, but as the rhetoric of party infighting during the Boer War, that it is best to confine the use of the label to the period of the war and its immediate aftermath, and that the spirit of the ideas used by Liberal Imperialists, particularly as regards their perspective on the Empire, was defensive and pessimistic. In these years the Liberal right — no less than the Liberal left, with its attack on “imperialism” — was engaged in reassessing Britain's world position.

It has been said with at least the spirit of truth that the British Empire was founded in a fit of absence of mind. And certainly the growth of Great Britain into a power on whose possessions the sun literally never set was not the result of clearly conceived policy or of some governmental master plan emanating from the corridors of Whitehall. Religious deviationists, commercial adventurers and jailers in quest of prisons were more often than not the founders of British colonial settlements. Given such a history, it is not surprising that enthusiasm for empire grew but slowly in Britain and that no lofty rationale for imperial advance was for many years forthcoming. Eventually, humanitarianism, evangelical Christianity and the “civilizing mission” associated with “bearing the white man's burden” combined to produce an imperial philosophy of sorts — a rather undefined dedication to “fair play” and an official determination that all subjects of the crown, regardless of race, color, religion or ethnic background, should be equal before the law.

The common conception of Empire was reflected in an article in the April 1896 issue of the North American Review. “Wherever her [Britain's] sovereignty has gone,” the writer, David Wells, contends,