Centenary commemorations can have their ironies. If we look from 1783 to 1883 to 1983, we see a rise in the status of centenaries, and a decline in the status of Algernon Sidney. This is, I think, the first time that a centenary of the Whig martyrdoms has been publicly observed. But it is not the first time one has been noticed. Soon after the first centenary, a play in London by the Irish clergyman Thomas Stratford about Sidney's fellow martyr Lord Russell, apparently a theatrical disaster of some magnitude, remarked on the passage of “one hundred years since godlike Russell bled” and portrayed Sidney as “Brutus of England,” whose “pulse beats with rapture at the sound of freedom.” Eleven years later, in the north German town of Kiel, the eighteen-year-old Barthold Georg Niebuhr—who was to exert so strong an influence on Ranke—celebrated as a “consecrated day” the “anniversary of Algernon Sidney's death.” (He got the day wrong, but that was an error common enough during the process of sanctification that raised Sidney's virtues above the chronological detail in which they had found reflection.) Niebuhr noted gloomily that, although Sidney's name and his “brilliant talents” were widely known, “perhaps there are not fifty persons in all Germany who have taken the pains to inform themselves accurately about his life and fortunes.” I doubt if there are fifty today.

On July 21, 1683, William, Lord Russell, the former leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons, was executed in Lincoln's Inn Fields for high treason. The week before a jury had convicted him of conspiring with other Whig leaders in schemes that have become known as the Rye House Plot to raise rebellion by capturing King Charles II's guards and, thereby, in law, to kill the king. But Russell is not known in history as a traitor or even as a Whig conspirator. Rather he is remembered as a Whig martyr, as a victim of late-Stuart tyranny, a man who suffered death in the cause of the liberties and rights of Englishmen and the true Protestant religion. To explain how the Whig conspirator became the Whig martyr and has remained so from 1683 to the present is my central purpose in this essay. I will show that the carefully constructed image of Russell as martyr drew inspiration from familial and political considerations and that it has influenced our understanding not only of Russell but also of late-Stuart politics and political ideas.

It is self-evident, I think, that a martyr is made—and made only by the interaction of three factors. First, an individual must die or endure suffering with great courage on behalf of some cause or principle. Although this is true of all martyrs, there seem to be no personality traits common to them. A common pattern of psychological behavior does seem apparent, however, among sixteenth-century English Protestant martyrs awaiting execution. Curiously, given the quantity of twentieth-century martyrs, modern psychiatrists have not studied martyrs systematically, but one has ventured the suggestion that a physiological condition—a “highly developed cortical base” in the brain that increases a person's capacity for empathy and decreases his regard for egocentric needs—may account for an individual's self-sacrifice. This is a tantalizing thought, but, obviously, at this remove in time it is impossible to discover anything about the structure of Lord Russell's brain. But evidence does show that he was a heedless person, prone to act without calculating the consequences.

Three points by way of introduction. The first concerns the definition and delineation of the subject. Because kingship is but one ill-defined kingdom in the shifting intellectual heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, I have been rigorous almost to the point of ruthlessness about excluding topics just at or beyond our boundaries. Not only scholarly contributions and scholars but also whole fields and subfields of historical inquiry have been precluded from consideration: the list of neglected, ignored, and relegated topics is very long indeed. Then I come to the question of whether this survey has any hopes for originality. What dreams I might have harbored for a new clarion call were quickly dashed when, early in my preparation of this article, I came on Eric John's comment that “more books have been written about Anglo-Saxon kingship than about Anglo-Saxon kings.” Once I got my torch alight I quickly realized how many footsteps already covered the path. And last, this article in some sense is offered as a memorial to Dorothy Whitelock, our greatest modern Anglo-Saxonist after Stenton. Though she did not live to complete her study of Alfred the Great, we have been assured that it will soon see the light of day. The frequency with which Whitelock's name appears in the bibliography gives some idea of her versatility and her relentless intellectual curiosity. To the study of kingship alone her first postwar contribution appears in the 1954 listings; her last—the reedition of her magisterial English Historical Documents, volume 1—in 1979.

The long postwar generation of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of which we now must be standing at the far chronological end, begins with the publication of Frank Merry Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England in 1943. Stenton was sixty-three when his great book appeared. Rarely has a large synthetic treatment simultaneously presented the state of the existing question and set the agenda for the next thirty or forty years.

If the sacred back was not always safe from family and associates in the Anglo-Saxon period, still less was it proffered in the Norman and Angevin periods. William I endured the rebellion of one son, William II an accidental death while hunting; Henry I suppressed a baronial rebellion in favor of his feckless brother Robert Curthose; Stephen's reign was characterized by lawlessness and rebellion on behalf of Empress Matilda. Henry II found his whole family actively at war against him, Richard I met his death in a political quarrel in Aquitaine, John was constrained by a rebellion of many barons to issue Magna Carta, Henry III faced constant baronial opposition to his policies, Edward I was compelled to face magnate disquiet from 1297 to 1300, Edward II was deposed (and betrayed by his wife). Edward III alone of the kings discussed in this portion of my article reigned withal quietly (after 1341) and successfully (in terms of familial and baronial opposition, at least until 1376). This is not a happy picture, but it is one that reminds us that family relations were vital to successful kingship and that a king must, if successful, be a canny politician. Unlike Rosenthal, I have chosen to limit my discussion of royal biography for the period 1066–1377 to pointing out the sources that have appeared in print since 1945 and to book-length royal biographies; no longer is it true (in the words of Sidney Painter written in 1949 that prefaced his study of The Reign of King John) that, “when I started to write this volume, there was no adequate account of the reign of a medieval English king.

The role of the British cabinet in the Anglo-French military conversations prior to the First World War has been and remains controversial. The acrimonious debate within the government during November 1911 seems linked inextricably to the flood of angry memoirs that followed August 1914 and to the continuing historical debate over the actions and motivations of the various ministers involved. Two generations of researchers now have examined an enormous body of evidence, yet the leading modern scholars continue to publish accounts that differ on the most basic questions. Historians have proved no more able than the ministers themselves were to reconcile the contradictory statements of honorable men. The persistence of these differences in historical literature demonstrates both the continuing confusion over the cabinet's role in the military conversations and the need for a renewed effort to resolve this confusion.

The starting point for any discussion of the staff talks must be the recognition that the meaning of the term changed significantly over the nine years before the outbreak of World War I. The contacts began with a series of informal discussions between senior British and French officers during 1905. The first systematic conversations took place early in January 1906 under the authority of Lord Esher, a permanent member of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), and Sir George Clarke, the CID secretary. Later in that month a small group of ministers, including Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, sanctioned formal, ongoing exchanges between the two general staffs.