Many charges were leveled against Piers Gaveston, the Gascon favorite of Edward II and earl of Cornwall from 1307 until his violent death at the hands of a group of disaffected magnates led by earls Thomas of Lancaster and Guy of Warwick in 1312. One of the most readily accepted has been the accusation that he had maliciously and illegally taken the royal treasure into his own hands and that he had then transported the treasure to his native Gascony. According to the contemporary Annales Londonienses, no sooner had Gaveston been recalled from exile than Edward bestowed the royal treasure upon him in its entirety: “Furthermore he has relinquished to the said Piers the disposition and control of all the royal treasure, jewels, and precious stones.” Other chronicles refer to Gaveston's acquisition of the royal treasure in 1307, linking it to the fall from grace of Edward I's former treasurer, Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (but most often styled bishop of Chester in contemporary accounts of the reign). According to the Annales Paulini, Gaveston, still not satisfied, induced Edward to give him the wedding gifts that the king had received from his new father-in-law, Philip the Fair of France. Moreover, the earl of Cornwall was supposed to have sent this treasure abroad resulting in the pauperization of both king and Crown. To the monastic chroniclers of the fourteenth century, and indeed to the magnates who drafted the Ordinances of 1311, the veracity of these allegations was too well established to require specific proof. Modern scholars, however, require more concrete evidence than the narrative sources supply of Gaveston's alleged wrongdoing. Documentary evidence sheds light upon the various questions revolving around Piers Gaveston and the royal treasure.

Despite the extensive critical attention that has been lavished upon Sir Thomas More's Utopia, the influence of the early historical narratives of the discovery and conquest of America on the shaping of his fictional commonwealth remains problematic. Proctor Fenn Sherwin, writing in 1917, declared that “it should go without saying” that “the yet novel discoveries of unknown and unguessed of peoples in America and the tales of Spanish explorers” were a “considerable inspiration” to More. But Sherwin admitted that, apart from a few references to Amerigo Vespucci's Four Voyages, he could find no echo of their writings in the text of Utopia. Subsequent research on the rich literary allusions in More's published works and unpublished correspondence has provided some fascinating insights into his remarkable erudition and complex character. It has also prompted extensive debate about the relative importance of various classical and medieval sources in inspiring More's celebrated but enigmatic fictional account of an imaginary commonwealth. But no new evidence demonstrating that More was in fact steeped in the early literature on the New World has been produced. Claims that he read Columbus and Peter Martyr as well as Vespucci remain unsubstantiated.

Some commentators have been untroubled by that lack of evidence. H. L. Donner assumed that More was familiar with Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World and from that source learned that the Indians of the West Indies “had an intuitive knowledge of the most essential moral and philosophical truths.” Donner concluded that More modelled Utopian “morality and religion” in large measure on Peter Martyr's description of the West Indians.

In Tudor Prelates and Politics, Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote sympathetically of the dilemma faced by the conservative bishops who saw control over the Church of England slip from their grasp after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, but he gave less attention to the reforming bishops who worked to advance the Protestant cause. At the beginning of the new reign the episcopal bench, according to Smith's calculations, included twelve conservatives, seven reformers, and seven whose religious orientation could not be determined (see Table 1). The ranks of the conservatives were thinned as a consequence of the deprivation of Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, Edmund Bonner of London, Nicholas Heath of Worcester, George Day of Chichester, and Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham. On the other hand, eight new bishops were appointed between 1547 and 1553. These new men together with the Henrician reformers, of whom Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was most important, had responsibility for leading the church during the period which saw the most extensive changes of the Reformation era. This essay examines the careers of the newly-appointed reforming bishops and attempts to assess their achievements and failures as they worked to create a reformed church in England.

The first of the eight new bishops appointed during the reign of Edward VI was Nicholas Ridley, who was named Bishop of Rochester in 1547 and translated to London in 1550. In 1548 Robert Ferrar became Bishop of St. David's in Wales. No new episcopal appointments occurred in 1549, but during the following year John Ponet succeeded Ridley at Rochester while John Hooper took the see of Gloucester.

Is free market capitalism intrinsically inimical to culture and learning? The question probably would not have occurred to many people twenty years ago. That it can be seriously put today is a sign of the times. Two things have happened to Britain over the past decade. One is the political revival of the idea of the “market,” under the aegis of probably the most zealous capitalist ideologues ever to take power in what had generally been a fairly pragmatic political culture before then. The second is a scries of damaging cuts, or what are claimed to be damaging cuts, in the public funding of higher education and the arts. Some of the victims of the latter have perceived behind them a positive antipathy on the part of the zealots to what they are doing and what they hold dear. If this is so, then where does it derive from? The personal idiosyncrasies of the zealots? Simple economic necessity? A genuine belief in alternative and perhaps better ways of supporting learning and culture? Or is free market capitalism fundamentally philistine?

The question has come up before. In the nineteenth century people also remarked on the cultural barrenness of their time. There can be no doubt that it was pretty barren in certain areas. Compared with the European continent, and with her own past, Britain was something of a cultural desert during most of the century, and particularly between the 1840s and the 1880s, which are usually regarded as the high plateau of her free market capitalism.

The Scottish capitalist Samuel Laing, who found great comfort in the belief that in Britain “there is no feeling for the fine arts, no foundation for them, no esteem for them” (Porter, p. 265), raises some important questions with regard the relationship between capitalism and the arts, particularly for Victorian Britain between 1840 and 1880, and, as well, in a more general sense for society today. Is free market capitalism antithetical to culture? Was Britain, in her golden age of capitalism a cultural desert? Was Victorian culture essentially a culture of “rank escapism?” (Porter, p. 254) Did the industrial capitalists regard art and learning as harmful, time wasting, and detrimental to civic virtue? Bernard Porter, in reflecting on Laing's work, suggests yes to all of these questions, and further suggests that Laing just may be the guide to lead us to some important revelations about the historic relationship between capitalism and the arts.

I confess at the outset that I am somewhat surprised at the direction my response to Bernard Porter's vigorous and provocative essay has taken. That I find his acceptance of Laing's Theorem (“Art flourishes in inverse proportion to Capitalism”) and his assertion that “free market capitalism [is] fundamentally philistine” (p. 253) reductionist may possibly be due to the fact that, as I proofread this, Texaco, one of capitalism's giants, is about to air its 1,000th opera broadcast on the New York Times' WQXR (one of the glories of commercially-sponsored East Coast culture), or that my college, like many others, receives generous funding from philanthropic capitalism, and indeed would not even exist without the vision and culture of a “bourgeois” brewer, Matthew Vassar. But there are other, deeper, reasons. I say my response surprises me, for I once thought that Matthew Arnold had it right and that the Victorian middle classes were uncultured (“bourgeois” = “philistine”), and that “free market capitalism” was infused with the conviction (Arnold's scorn notwithstanding) that civilization could be measured in, even achieved through, coal or cotton. This was nowhere better expressed than by Richard Cobden in his rhapsodic paean to Manchester's civilizing mission.

I found Professors Wohl's and Schmiechen's replies informative and stimulating. Unfortunately I do not think they would upset the dreadful Laing. Before I go on to explain why, however, I should correct two misunderstandings.

Firstly: I offered “Laing's theorem” as a hypothesis, not necessarily as my view. Nowhere in my original article did I indicate my “acceptance” of it (Wohl). It is simply an idea to be tested, as a possible explanation for what I do regard as high Victorian Britain's artistic poverty, of which more in a moment. Secondly: I do not regard myself as a “basher” of Victorianism, of the kind that used to be common a few years ago. That is Professor Schmiechen's charge. As I understand and indeed remember it, the old bashers deplored Victorian taste. I on the contrary have a consuming passion for it. In particular, I have a high regard for Victorian architecture, which is one of the two areas I specifically exempted (though Professor Wohl has missed this) from my strictures against the quality of the high Victorians' cultural achievement. For what it is worth — and it is not worth much, being only my own personal opinion, but I feel I need to establish my credentials here — I would place All Saint's, Margaret Street, London, by Butterfield, high on my list of the most inspiring buildings anywhere in the world, and St. Mary's Church, Studley Royal, Yorkshire, by Burges, among the half-dozen most beautiful. There is dedication for you. This may lower one or two philo-Victorians' hackles. I hope so.