It has long been an established part of the Cromwellian legend that some time during the 1630's Oliver Cromwell made the decision to abandon England in favor of a fresh start in the New World but was prevented from doing so by the government of Charles I. There is evidence that among the Puritan leaders he was not alone in this resolve. What were the motives that led such men to consider leaving England? How serious were they? Why were their plans not carried out? This essay will examine the case of Sir Arthur Hesilrige about whom sufficient evidence exists to allow us to supply the answers to some basic questions about the Puritan leaders' intended emigration to New England.

Sir Arthur Hesilrige, the second son of Sir Thomas Hesilrige, baronet of Nosely, was born in 1601. His family, an ancient and prosperous member of the landed gentry, possessed the manor of Nosely in Leicestershire and had extensive holdings and connections in Northumberland, the county of their origin. Little is known of his early life. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and at Gray's Inn where he may well have met several future parliamentarians and Cromwellians with whom he was later to associate. In 1624 upon completion of his education he married Frances Elmes, the daughter of Thomas Elmes, a Northhampshire gentleman. Six years later in January, 1630, upon his father's death, Arthur succeeded to the baronetcy and the estates, his elder brother having preceded his father in death.

The British Parliamentary system has broken down in Ulster as it has broken down many times in Ireland in the past. In fact, many events in the current agonizing crisis of Northern Ireland suggest scenes from the past. The mutual hatreds of Catholics and Protestants seem unchanged from the seventeenth century world of Cromwell and William of Orange. The Orange Lodges of 1973 seem the same as those of 1795. William Craig's Ulster Vanguard is a conscious revival of Sir Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers of 1912-1914. The Provisional I.R.A. in 1973 attempts to re-enact the history of the Irish Republican Army of Michael Collins in 1920 and 1921. One element from past Irish troubles, however, is fortunately lacking. This breakdown in Ireland, unlike all earlier breakdowns, has created no crisis in Britain. In the past, British Governments have been badly shaken by Irish troubles. This time, however, there is no battle over Ireland either within the British parties or between the British parties.

It was dramatically different in the months between April, 1912, and August, 1914, the period of the battle over the Third Home Rule Bill and the starting point for this paper. This Ulster crisis brought Ireland to the brink of civil war, turned the Conservative Party into sponsors of rebellion, and produced something like a mutiny among the officers of a British Army unit. These events have been described in several books and in many chapters of political histories and biographies. Indeed, the Ulster crisis and the reactions of the Conservatives, Liberals, and Irish Nationalists have been amply studied. Only one group in the story has been neglected. With the exception of George Dangerfield in his Strange Death of Liberal England, writers on the Ulster crisis virtually ignore the Labour Party. This is easily understood. The battle over Home Rule which initiated the Ulster crisis of 1912-1914 was waged between the Liberal Government allied with the Irish Nationalists on one side and the Conservative Party with their Ulster Unionist wing on the other.

Although Henry Fielding may not always have been fully aware of his participation in it, he and the colorful Mrs. Eliza Haywood conducted a feud which began in 1730 and did not end until 1752. There was a time of apparent peace between them when Mrs. Haywood worked for Fielding at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1736 and 1737, a fact which may account for Fielding scholars being aware only of the final engagements in 1751 and 1752 when Mrs. Haywood launched an attack upon Fielding in the course of her heroine's adventures in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Fielding apparently retaliated by bringing a B— T— to trial in his Covent Garden Journal, charging her with dullness. There had, however, been earlier action which makes clear that Mrs. Haywood felt herself to be a woman scorned; and, that although she had been attacked in print by other writers of her day, it was the scorn of Fielding she could least bear.

Up to now it has been Mrs. Haywood's attack upon Fielding in Betsy Thoughtless that has been the puzzler. G.F. Whicher, her biographer, could give no satisfactory explanation, calling it “An outburst of unexplained virulence.” Fielding scholars add little more. They do not, indeed, go much beyond Austin Dobson's:

Among the numerous preoccupations of historians one of the most persistent concerns the political and diplomatic skill of England's Elizabeth I. From the two extremes of James Anthony Froude and Elizabeth Jenkins through the judicious work of J. E. Neale, scholars have long been frustrated by the English queen's apparent inconsistency, though dazzled by the brilliance of her reign. The result is a plethora of argument. It is the attempt here to illuminate Elizabethan foreign policy by isolating one minor aspect of it: the career of the Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio. Hopefully the result will be a slightly clearer perception of that most illusive lady.

It can be asserted that two interests went to the very heart of foreign affairs in the reign of Elizabeth I: the encouragement of English maritime expansion and the resolve to keep the Netherlands from absolute domination by a major continental state. The maelstrom of international events in the second half of the sixteenth century placed both of these policies in stark juxtaposition to the interests of Spain, the greatest state of the age and the spear's tip of the militant Counter-Reformation.

By 1580 Anglo-Spanish relations had suffered a steady deterioration for two decades. The might of Philip II of Spain appeared boundless. Then in that year Philip's power grew perceptibly greater by the acquisition of the Portuguese throne, the significance of which did not escape the English. Had it not been for a persistent rival-Don Antonio, the Prior of Crato—King Philip might have conquered an old and respected kingdom with no more effort than it took to lace his boots.

For at least two thousand years the metallic mineral wealth of Britain—its tin, copper, lead, iron, silver and gold—has been diligently, if intermittently, sought by merchant and manufacturer, by statesman and speculator, yet only in the last two centuries have soundly-based conceptions of the origin of metalliferous deposits been clearly postulated and widely accepted. Systematic prospecting, surveying and exploitation of the major deposits has been the work of an even shorter period of time. In the immediately preceding centuries practice and theory alike were curious concoctions of practical commonsense, specious medieval theory and spurious alchemical notions—in the words of an eminent modern authority:

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries important and wide-reaching changes took place in the geographical distribution and the intensity of metalliferous mining in the British Isles. From a predominantly surface operation at the beginning of the Tudor Age, metalliferous mining had become a largely subterranean activity by the end of the Stuart era. This led, in virtually all parts of the two islands, to a modified, if not completely transformed, mining technology. During a century of transition, between approximately 1540 and 1640, much of the art of underground mining was learned by the miners of Cornwall and Devon, the High Peak, Alston Moor and other mining districts, an art which was to come to full flower in the nineteenth century and lead to the exodus of the “Cousin Jacks” to Michigan and Nevada, Broken Hill, Iron Knob and a hundred other mining districts in the Americas, Africa and Australasia, where experienced hard rock miners were in high demand.

It has been remarked that the dissolution of the monasteries amounted to an infinite series of adjustments. This could hardly be more true than it is in the case of what happened to the lands of the dissolved abbey of St. Werburgh in Chester—a city about one hundred and seventy miles northwest of London, situated in a section of the country that was, at least compared with much of the south, uncouth and backward. Here the process of adjustment was so protracted, and in the end productive of so much acrimony, that the intervention of the highest authority in the land—that of the queen herself—was directly necessary for its successful completion, and, even with that intervention, a final concord was scarcely achieved before the 16th century gave way to the seventeenth. In Cheshire, the upheaval caused by the sudden disappearance of the regular Church was long in settling down. Settlement there was, eventually, but it was so slow in coming that one might consider amending the definition of the dissolution mentioned above to read: an infinite series of adjustments, almost infinitely prolonged.

What happened in Cheshire can be seen from at least two viewpoints. It can be viewed as providing spectacular evidence as to who benefited the most from Henry VIII's attack upon the ecclesiastical institution; or it can be cited as a case study of just how the central government exercised its control over local affairs during the latter sixteenth century. Here I am concerned with both.