The name John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, evokes the image of the ambitious and selfish politician who was responsible for the death of Lady Jane Grey. The son of an executed traitor, and a traitor and apostate Protestant himself, Northumberland has been defamed by chroniclers and historians since his death in 1553. His reputation rests upon alleged character defects and a political career that putatively divided, weakened, and dishonored the country. Attributions of crime and misdeeds, regardless whether proved, have made him one of the most notorious villains of the early modern period.

Notwithstanding the inevitable disagreement over the particulars of Northumberland's life and work, the consensus is that he was the worst of a group of grasping, unprincipled new men who gained favor with Henry VIII and acquired status and wealth through the plunder of the church. Northumberland served the king as a soldier, courtier, and diplomat, and appealed to Henry's baser instincts, seeking only to advance himself socially and financially. It was only after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, so the traditional interpretation would have us believe, that circumstances permitted Northumberland to betray his true character and motives, and the full extent of his perversity. First, he allegedly supported a coup d'état that overthrew the will of the deceased king and installed the Duke of Somerset as Protector. Later, he intrigued to destroy the Protector's brother, Thomas, Lord Seymour, and then to depose Somerset. Following the overthrow of the Protector in 1549, Northumberland, aided by a small faction, instituted a regime of social repression, entered into a dishonorable alliance with France, and instigated the trial and execution of Somerset on entirely spurious charges. Throughout the reign of Edward VI, he encouraged the more radical Protestant reformers although he is said to have lacked sincere religious convictions.

Art historians and cultural historians have noted what appears to be a puzzle in eighteenth-century history, a puzzle which emerges from an apparent conflict of the following trend: as English country houses became more and more classical, the gardens around them became less so. That is, as architecture progressively conformed to the principles of universal order and mathematical geometry embodied in the Palladian ideal, gardens seemed to repudiate those same principles, embracing irregularity and particularity. Another apparently contradictory trend is noteworthy: as country houses became smaller through the eighteenth century, the gardens around them became larger. By the later eighteenth century people of means seem to have preferred smallish houses in acres of parkland, rather than enormous houses in small, formal gardens.

There are two possible ways of approaching this problem. The first is simply to ignore the contradiction and accept the houses and gardens as products of separate traditions. Most art historians have done this, fitting the houses and gardens respectively into the classical and romantic traditions. The houses are said to be classical in style because they were intended to appeal to the reasoning faculties of the Enlightenment mind, while the gardens are called romantic because they were designed to appeal principally to the subjective and non-rational faculties, the senses and the emotions. The puzzle of classical houses in romantic gardens simply does not arise when an author such as Hussey, for example, examines the history of gardens, or when Summerson writes about the classical country house.

The middle years of the eighteenth century in England were on the whole a period when few women made any impact on the public scene. Writing gradually became a respectable way for a woman to earn a living, but women writers generally confined their efforts to the novel, belle lettres, or instructional works. The most important exception was Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay. She began to publish first as an historian and then turned to topical political pamphleteering.

Descended on both sides from Whiggish City businessmen, Catherine Sawbridge of Olantigh, Kent, married in 1760 George Macaulay. He was a Scots born physician who had wide connections in London, both among Scots and medical men, and among political radicals and non-conformists. Perhaps the most important intimate of the Macaulay circle was Thomas Hollis, a well-to-do republican barrister, bibliophile, and collector of objects of vertu. Other radical friends included several dissenting ministers, among them Caleb Fleming, Theophilus Lindsey, Richard Baron, and Richard Price, and several writers on historical and political subjects, including William Harris, Adam Ferguson, and James Burgh. Catherine's brother, John Sawbridge, was active in City politics, where he had connections both by inheritance and marriage. Thus the Macaulay household offered a meeting place for both theorists and active politicians.

In December 1905 R.B. Haldane, later Viscount Haldane of Cloan, became Secretary of State for War. Among his fellow politicians Haldane, at this time, was looked on as an intriguer who combined habitual meddling in high places with a curious and remarkable interest in German philosophy. The Prime Minister of the day, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had good reason to dislike Haldane, nicknamed him “Schopenhauer.” Both men knew that the War Office had ruined the reputations of several of Haldane's predecessors. “We shall now see,” remarked Campbell-Bannerman, in a phrase that later became famous, “how Schopenhauer gets on in the Kailyard.” Despite this unpromising start Haldane's military reforms were so successful that they established his reputation in history as one of the great servants of the state in the pre-1914 era. His work and accomplishments in the field of military aviation, however, have been criticized very severely. In fact, the matter is so complicated that one aviation authority has written of the record in this area that “Haldane's actions behind the scenes may never be known with certainty.”

Even some of his closest subordinates in the field of military aeronautics were very critical of Haldane's attitude and outlook. In February 1911 a major step was taken when, by an Army Order, a unit known as the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers was created. This Battalion was entrusted with the duty of training a “body of expert airmen.” The Battalion's first commander was Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, an officer who knew little about airplanes, but was instead a balloon expert with experience in the South African and Russo-Japanese wars.