We are apt to associate Puritanism, quite reasonably, with evangelical preaching, and to talk about the Puritan movement as the tail end of the English Reformation, as the last attempt to take Biblical Christianity into every parish pulpit and hence into the hearts of God's “Elect Nation.” As a consequence, it has seemed both proper and illuminating to view the history of Elizabethan Puritanism as a series of confrontations between Puritan ministers and the Queen's bishops, the bishops attempting to create unity by imposing uniformity of practice, the Puritan ministers attempting to follow what they believed Scripture and the example of the best reformed Churches dictated, with the inevitable consequence that they found themselves engaged in a kind of perpetual guerrilla war with the Queen's guardians of a prescribed uniform order.

If such basic assumptions are accepted, then the history of Elizabethan Puritanism can be seen as a series of escalating encounters, beginning in 1564, when the Queen forced the issue of discipline and order on a reluctant Church by requiring that Archbishop Parker publish his Advertisements. The debating stage was over in the Spring of 1566, when Parker and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners summoned the defiant London clergy to conform to the prescribed clerical dress or face expulsion for refusing to wear what Robert Crowley called “the conjuring garments of popery.” The year 1570 saw an escalation of the controversy. Cartwright's lectures on the nature of the true church mounted a much more substantial attack than had been seen in the first decade of the reign, for it was one thing to attack the surplice as a popish garment, quite another to argue that episcopacy itself lacked a Scriptural basis and that by implication it was, therefore, the Queen's duty to impose “discipline out of the Word”—a Presbyterian order—on the Church of England. In 1572 two Londoners, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, tried to give political reality to these notions in their Admonition to the Parliament.

The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.

Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.

A paper of this title must inevitably be extremely selective. The subject is complex and the available material vast in bulk. As Paul Langford has recently shown with his study on the first Rockingham administration one could conceivably do justice to it at the rate of one volume a year for much of the period 1763 to 1776. I can do no more in the compass of this paper than pursue one or two themes which appear to be emerging from the mass of recent detailed scholarship. Moreover, I am going to take a major, though I hope justified liberty with my title, and treat of policies as well as politics. After all the second is not fully intelligible without the first. This paper does not adopt a “structure of politics” approach. Thanks to the initiatives of Sir Lewis Namier in that field we now have a pretty full knowledge of the structural framework of British politics during the revolutionary crisis, and this provides useful guidelines for understanding the ebb and flow of political controversy—as the recent work of Paul Langford and Peter Thomas bears admirable witness. But knowledge of political structure tells us little about the essence of the arguments connected with the American question. We cannot understand the politics unless we understand the policies which were at issue.

The Yale Center for Parliamentary History (YCPH) was organized in 1966 by Professor J. H. Hexter to continue the work begun by Professor Wallace Notestein in the study of English Parliamentary History. Aside from the primary task of editing the proceedings in the House of Commons in 1628, the Center, at its inception, undertook to collect and make available to scholars all known accounts (published and unpublished) of the proceedings in the English parliaments from 1558 to 1660, and relevant materials relating to the M.P.s who sat in those parliaments.

The YCPH's collection of manuscript materials is composed principally of photographic reproductions: microfilms, photostats, and xeroxes. We are indebted to various English archival repositories for having permitted us to film these materials. There are, however, certain restrictions on their use. The Center has agreed with the archival institutions not to make copies of the photographic reproductions supplied to the YCPH. In accordance with the 1956 Copyright Act scholars must secure permission from the owners of the original manuscripts if they desire to publish in toto or to quote extensively from filmed manuscripts studied at the Center. The situation vis a vis transcripts is somewhat different. In some cases the Center has made transcripts of manuscripts in the course of its editorial work. These transcripts are the property of the YCPH and, with permission, may be quoted in scholarly works, cited as “Transcripts), YCPH.” Certain of these transcripts are also available on loan from the Center (postage and, if necessary, xerox costs to be assumed by the requester). In other cases scholars working elsewhere in the country in Tudor-Stuart history have generously deposited copies of their transcripts for use at the Center. Permission to quote from these transcripts deposited at the Center must be obtained from the individuals who made them.

When Henry VIII raised Thomas Cromwell to the earldom of Essex, most observors were both dazzled by the ceremony and deceived as to its significance. The French ambassador Marillac had taken the measure of events, however. He had speculated that Cromwell would lose authority in religious matters, while perhaps retaining it in worldly affairs. Those whom Cromwell had put in the shade reserved “une bonne pensée” for him, Marillac said. And Cromwell's close ties to religious radicals (Friar Barnes and the Calais Sacramentarians) provided weapons to his enemies. Norfolk and his conservative friends feared further reformation might provide occasions for new waves of rebellion in a country already under diverse threats at home and abroad. They would not miss their chance to cast down the upstart.

Modern historians have dismissed Marillac's chief point, that Cromwell would fall because he had used his powers to make a ‘party’ in the State. Foxe, Hall and Burnet had seen the king's minister in that light. Many of Cromwell's contemporaries held such views. But the weight of Professor Elton's opinion has lain heavily on the subject. He dismissed Marillac as little more than an ill-in-formed gossip. Then, turning to the evidence of the Act of Attainder passed against Cromwell, the Cambridge wizard treated it with equal severity. Allegations that Cromwell had illegally retained heretical men, in order to have a force with which to defend error with sword in hand, were obviously contrived.

Except for the Visitations and occasional obedientary rolls preserved in cathedral libraries, the intimate records of English monastic life are disappointingly scarce. They are particularly scarce in East Anglia, where many documents had already been destroyed during the Peasants' Revolt, long before the usual ravages following the Dissolution. It is therefore surprising that one of the few important manuscripts which did survive has received very little attention from scholars. I refer to the priors' accounts from the Cluniac Priory of Our Lady at Thetford, Norfolk.

While very little remains to tell us about life at the priory during the middle ages, we are at least fortunate to have these extremely detailed and almost complete priors' accounts for the final forty-four years of the priory's existence. They are now bound together in a single well-preserved volume, and are deposited at the University Library, Cambridge (Add. Ms. 6969). Although this lengthy manuscript has apparently been at Cambridge for a very long time, it was unknown to the great Norfolk antiquarian, F. Blomefield, when he wrote his History of Thetford (1739). Thomas Martin was unaware of the document when he published his own History of Thetford (1779)—even though he had access to other important materials, including notes from the priory's Cartulary which had perished in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. The manuscript was also unknown to the committee which compiled the Victoria County History of Norfolk in 1906, despite the fact that L. G. Bolingbroke had seen it and printed two entries from it in “Pre-Elizabethan Plays and Players in Norfolk.”

For all the pride which it engendered among contemporaries, who saw in the Tudor fisheries a nursery for English seamen and even a hallmark for the national identity, the fishing industry in the sixteenth century has received scant attention from English historians. This neglect has been doubly unfortunate. On the one hand, it leaves us in general ignorance of the industry itself: its organization, personnel, productivity, and economic importance in both national and regional terms. On the other, it has denied us the opportunity to observe a tradition-bound industry of considerable antiquity as it faced the political, economic, and technological changes of the post-medieval era.

The format of an essay cannot reasonably encompass a detailed study of a major industry, but the selection of a particular case for study can at least present a helpful paradigm for the whole, and fill part of the void in the existing literature. The fishing industry of Great Yarmouth seems an appropriate choice. The fact that herring collected off the mouth of the River Yare each September for as far back as man can remember has made the association of Yarmouth and fishing as old as it is logical. Fishermen plied those grounds from at least the sixth century, making the town one of the earliest recorded fishing centres of Northern Europe, and well before the Conquest townsmen had dedicated their parish church to St. Nicholas, patron of fishermen. Throughout the Middle Ages Yarmouth stood alone as the chief supplier of herring, a dietary staple to the English market, and ranked near the top of the European fishing industry.

During the past several years published studies of nineteenth-century parliamentary elections in several regions have failed to satisfy all those who have wished for a thorough understanding of the electoral structure of Victorian Britain. Perhaps the most important statements about these elections have been made by D.C. Moore, for he has been one of very few researchers to place his findings into a theoretical structure. Professor Moore's model for voting behavior is that of the deference community, which may be described as a group of individuals who, having close contact through occupation, residency, or other interests—or several of these—acknowledged a limited number of individuals as their social, economic and ideological leaders. According to Moore the deference community is a more powerful explanatory device than models based on class or individualism. He supports this with poll book data which suggest that, at least for rural constituencies prior to 1867, group networks were stronger than the ties of social status, and more apparent, than is evidence that electors voted only for their particular interests.

What influenced the decay of the deference community, Moore would argue, were those forces seemingly omnipresent every spring in Western Civilization classes—industrialization, urbanization, and migration. Moore suggests that the three forces weakened the traditional social nexus and hierarchical relationships. Voters thereafter could be recruited by Victorian election managers directly, that is as individuals and not as members of a community.

King Charles I's dissolution of the Short Parliament, 5 May 1640, proved politically disastrous. Six months later he was forced to call another Parliament, which immediately launched an attack on his councillor, the early of Strafford. Within two years civil war had broken out. The dissolution of the Short Parliament came only the day after Charles had sent to the Commons a message, apparently offering a compromise in the dispute whether his supply or their grievances should be handled first. The Commons discussed the King's offer all day and finally adjourned, requesting permission to resume their debate the next morning, thus making it possible for negotiations to continue. His Majesty, however, closed the door to further discussion and ended the Parliament. No compromise was concluded.

The idea of compromise, or “the arrangement of a dispute by concessions on both sides,” was not foreign to the Englishmen of the early seventeenth century. The words, compromise, mediate, compound and its substantive composition, all appear in the O.E.D. with sixteenth or early seventeenth-century dates. Nor were they divorced from the context of Parliament. When early seventeenth-century Englishmen thought of Parliament, they thought of an assembly where King, Lords, and Commons met and together served the interests of both King and subject. Although ideally these interests were not supposed to conflict, procedures existed to facilitate agreement within Parliament. The King might communicate with the two Houses through his councillors, while the Commons used their Speaker and the Lords relied upon various of their own number to voice concerns to his Majesty.

This paper is the first fruit of a study of electoral politics in the Borough of Cambridge between the first and second Reform Bills, in which we are attempting to explore in detail some of the most important general questions about the political history of mid-Victorian Britain.

The critical importance of the period between 1832 and 1868 to the transition from aristocratic rule to parliamentary democracy in Britain is not in doubt. In the terms of the most useful comparative study (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) 1832 represented an early, genuine but limited concession by the old elite to bourgeois and working class claims to political influence, a remarkably Whig view. The major works on the politics of the period (esp. Gash 1933 and Hanham 1959) have emphasised the limited nature of the concession while other have thrown doubt on the notion of concession, at all, pointing out the conservative intentions behind the First Reform Bill (Moore 1966, 1976) and the contingent pressures on the actual provisions of the Second (Cowling 1967). Control of Parliament remained largely where it had been before; the decline of aristocratic government was long drawn out; adaptation of the political system followed slowly in the wake of economic and social change. Middle class reform and militant labour were gradually accommodated in the parliamentary system, enlisted in the ranks of the aristocratic parties, which though transformed, even now, moderate, loyal, constitutionalist, bear the marks of their origin. Part of the explanation for the success of gradualism must be sought in the weakness of the labor movement and its failure at the revolutionary moment, which has been illuminated in detail by Foster's studies of industrial towns (1967, 1968, 1974).

The authors of the two preceding papers have both given us multum in parvo—by which I mean that each has dealt with a particular, localized problem and at the same time raised larger and very important questions. Professor Slavin has cast a new light on one of the major mysteries of early Tudor history—the fall of Thomas Cromwell. He adds substantially to G.R. Elton's careful survey of the evidence and takes us another step forward in the elucidation of this momentous episode.

Professor Seaver has focussed on a problem which other historians of the Puritan movement have hinted at but not fully explored, in suggesting that the role of the laity in the Reformation has been underestimated—and in the further assumption that they cannot be conveniently ticketed with the labels in common usage to designate the various clerical factions of the religious left. Both he and Professor Slavin have redirected our attention to the fundamental ambiguities of the English Reformation. Too often writers have unconsciously assumed that it was a fairly coherent process, moving in a reasonably orderly progression through the stages of separation from Rome followed by the renunciation of the mass and, then, after 1559, by a division within the Protestant ranks between Puritans and those who are anachronistically referred to as Anglicans. The process was in fact at every stage a very untidy splintering in which, as in Professor Slavin's study, the struggle is not between two well-defined adversaries but rather a tangled melee in which friend and foe were not always clearly identifiable. What I should like to reflect on briefly here is one such ambiguity, which has not always been presented with maximum clarity. I refer to the confused and indeed contradictory character of the church established by law in 1559 and its fumbling response to the initial challenge of Protestant dissent.

The main feature which distinguishes Scottish local government from English local government in the later eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century is the presence there of professional men—the sheriffs. The sheriff, and later the sheriff-substitute, was the key to the legal and administrative system in the Scottish countries. He had no English equivalent. Essentially he was a representative of the central government who administered justice at the local level. After the reforms of 1748 the sheriff was a bureaucrat in the finest sense—highly trained and efficient. The substitute acquired strict standards more slowly, but by 1830 he too had to meet high standards in training and performance.

Before the mid-eighteenth century, the sheriff had hardly been a progressive figure. Indeed, the Scottish sheriff typified the backward state of Scottish local government, a state which had been little affected by the Act of Union. In 1700 Scotland lacked a uniform system of justice. Independent franchise courts and hereditary rights to judicial offices, including that of sheriff, were common throughout the Lowlands. They were relatively rare in the Highlands, because the king's justice had never made sufficient headway to make possible or necessary these particular legal perversions.

Few of us really know much about the way in which we are perceived by the rest of the world—we as Americans, we as scholars, we (in this case) as historians of Great Britain. Indeed, to many this last question probably appears irrelevant; insofar as we function as historians, we are members of an international community of scholarship, whose compass transcends national boundaries, and conscious as we may be of our cultural and temporal biases, we seek as far as possible in our work to throw them off, and as scholars we welcome any contributions by our fellows throughout the world if what they say adds to the store of knowledge.

So the studies, the monographs, the interpretive works pour out, year after year; certainly few specialists of the Stuart period could hope to master the vast mass of material which exists. Why then be concerned with what a group of professors and dockworkers in a provincial Chinese town has to say about British history? With one or two exceptions, their sources are a half-century or more old; have they read Hill, Stone, Trevor-Roper, Hexter? There is no evidence of it. Are they aware of the work which is being done in local history, in demographic history, in the studies of the composition of Parliament? Do they know anything of what court and country parties stood for? Do they appreciate at all the impact of Puritanism (which after all was perhaps not too far from Maoism in its techniques of mobilization and organization)?

There is a story told among English historians about two enterprising and perceptive young scholars who, more than fifty years ago, determined that their common interest in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Parliaments could best be served by a fundamental division of labor. One of them, Professor Wallace Notestein, took as his province the early Stuart Parliaments while the other, Professor John Neale, took the Elizabethan Parliaments as his own. Elaborations of this story tell us that while Notestein had a goodly collection of diaries and journals to work with in his studies, Neale was less well served by the evidence; thus he was forced to cut accordingly his scholarly coat. This led to a parliamentary history which concentrated upon a limited range of important constitutional issues: the succession, the religious settlement, and the privileges of the House. Neale excluded from his study any account of the economic and social legislation of his period. On the other hand, Notestein, who had more material to work with, was able to produce a more encompassing history which took into account the economic and social legislation as well as the structure of English government in its many parts.

Neale has dominated the field by the sheer volume of his work, by the apparent comprehensiveness of his evidence, and by the elegance of his style. His interpretation of the Elizabethan period has come to be cited as authority, and it has colored the writings of many younger historians. For the novice scholar, however, Neale's histories are fraught with hidden difficulties. Neale provided no caveat to warn the reader of his limited range of topics. Because of the scope of his work and the clarity of his argument, the student is often left with the impression that the only issues which were significant were the constitutional issues, and that the only goal of politically ambitious Elizabethan Englishmen was a seat in Parliament.

When one of the characters in William Morris's Utopian romance News from Nowhere says “We are very well off as to politics—because we have none” he was talking about the manipulation and intrigue that everyone hopes will be banished from Utopia. Morris had to carry on his own political work amidst the manoeuvring he hoped would be unnecessary in the future. News from Nowhere is about politics in the sense in which the word is used in the title of Aristotle's Politics; and it teaches the rather Aristotelian message “Men come together in communities to live, they remain in communities to live in fellowship.” But the book had its local and immediate political context: most directly, in 1890 Morris gave up the editorship of the Socialist League magazine Commonweal, which was publishing the story in installments, when twenty out of the thirty-nine installments had appeared. While his retirement was not entirely voluntary there is no reason to think that the remaining installments were altered by the new editors. When Morris published the story as a book the following year he added a certain amount of new material which indicates a somewhat different point of view.

What he published in 1890 (the Commonweal version) was considerably closer to the anarchist view of revolution than what is now accepted as News from Nowhere, and what he added for the 1891 version (the book) shows a distinct shift towards an attitude more favourable to the State Socialists, or Fabians, that anything he wrote in Commonweal.

Britain's abortive attempt in January 1762 to conciliate Austria and restore the “Old System”—generally known as the Hague Overture—and its subsequent impact on Frederick II of Prussia (then Britain's ally), has never been investigated in detail. Altogether, only two works have ever focused on the episode directly: a brief, but in some ways useful monograph by A. von Ruville, the biographer of Pitt and a later article by W. L. Dorn. Essentially advancing the same interpretation, both authors agree that: Newcastle, by unduly interfering in the Northern Department (held by the Earl of Bute), stands solely responsible for the misleading proposals transmitted to Vienna; and that Bute, lacking a definite policy of his own, submissively followed Newcastle's lead throughout and finally, Kaunitz divulged the story in its most expansive form to Berlin where, as a result, it irreparably damaged Britain's already tarnished reputation. Though forming the nucleus of what is probably the traditional or standard account, endorsed uncritically by most historians up-to-date (among them D. B. Horn, F. Spencer, and R. Browning), these conclusions are highly questionable if not inaccurate, and clearly require substantial revision and modification when reappraised within a wider framework of documentary evidence. Equally, certain important, inter-related aspects have never been studied at all: for instance, the motive forces behind Newcastle's initial formulation of the scheme; the ambivalent role played by Lord Bute; the views and aims of the chosen mediator, Prince Louis of Brunswick; and the deliberations of Baron Knyphausen and Louis Michell, the Prussian envoys in London. This article by utilizing new material from heretofore unexplored sources, aims not only to rectify these and other vital defects, to provide a more coherent, comprehensive outline of events, but also to assess the significance of this episode for Anglo-Prussian relations during a singularly critical period of diplomatic history.