The band of gentlemen pensioners, a body which, diminished in size and its functions altered almost beyond recognition, still survives at the English royal court under the title of “The Honourable Corps of Her Majesty's Gentlemen at Arms,” was instituted on Christmas Eve 1539 as part of a reform of the royal household. The group was a revival of the “spears” or “spears of honour,” an elite, sumptuously-outfitted royal bodyguard of gentlemen founded by Henry VIII in 1509, shortly after his accession, which appears to have lapsed in 1515 or 1516, because of the great charges involved in their maintenance, according to Hall's chronicle. The revived group was provided for in a rather more modest manner than its predecessor had been, but its members served much the same purposes. They were the king's elite bodyguard, his personal companions in arms when he went to war, the principal participants in tournaments and other martial sports at court and, more generally, a courtly and military finishing school for the sons of nobility and gentry.

From 1540 until 1670, when the band underwent its first reduction in size, its structural organization remained unchanged in all essentials. It consisted of fifty men and five officers, a captain, lieutenant, standard-bearer, clerk of the check and harbinger. The last two were ancillary offices, the keeper of the “check-list” or attendance roll and his deputy, and were not strictly speaking members of the corps, but its servants. The lieutenant and the standard-bearer were normally men who had served for a time as gentlemen pensioners before being appointed to these offices, while the captain, on the contrary, was a figure of some importance at court in his own right, and one who had not previously served in the band. After the death of the first captain, Sir Anthony Browne, Henry VIII's master of the horse, in 1548, subsequent captains under the Tudor and early Stuart monarchs were all peers and almost always held other great offices of state. Browne's successor, William Parr, marquess of Northampton, was Edward VI's lord chamberlain; he lost all of his offices and titles on Mary's accession and was lucky to escape with his life. Thomas Radcliffe, lord Fitzwalter, later earl of Sussex, succeeded him in the captaincy, holding it continuously until his death in 1583. From 1572 he held the office of lord chamberlain to the queen. His Elizabethan successors in the captaincy, the first and second lords Hunsdon, father and son, the queen's kinsmen, also held the lord chamberlainship.

In the preceding article, Dr. William Tighe has drawn attention once again to a central mystery surrounding those ill-understood weeks between the death of Edward VI and Queen Mary's triumphal entry into London which I initially commented upon in this journal in 1974. The problem involves the rapidity with which Northumberland's army collapsed. The traditional interpretation has long been that the duke's forces consisted only of unreliable mercenaries and that he lacked support from the ruling elements which could have given him the means to carry out his coup. In my article I suggested that this was not the case. Gentlemen had been willing to risk their lives in his cause, and although it was impossible to know the relative strengths of the two sides with precision, I found no evidence that contemporaries found them to be unequal. Nor did I find support for Professor Jordan's contention that Northumberland was a reluctant conspirator who really wanted to surrender power and retire to his estates. Examination of accounts in the files of the great wardrobe also led me to conclude that so far as the gentlemen pensioners were concerned, military men had supported the coup while politicians had taken the side of legitimacy. Admittedly the definitions were not precise, but in the absence of other records, it seemed to enhance understanding of the deliberations taken in those fatal days.

Since the publication of my article, other scholars have also pointed to the vigor and quality of Northumberland's leadership. Dale Hoak has recently extended the “rehabilitation” of the Duke of Northumberland begun by Barrett Beer. Hoak showed that Northumberland was far from reluctant to use force and political guile to achieve his purposes. He took control of the royal household in order to control access to the king. He also created a special household bodyguard, known as the gendarmes, to secure his coup and overawe potential troublemakers. To complete the picture of a man determined to hold on to power, Hoak showed how Northumberland had managed to manipulate the young king by planting suggestions which the boy then incorporated into his desires. Thus the alteration of the succession should be seen as Northumberland's own scheme to retain power, and not the dying king's. Although the gendarmes had proved too costly to maintain and had to be disbanded, Northumberland's plan was clear: maintain control of power by using the king's household in both its military and political aspects.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 signaled a revolution that was more apparent than real. Studies of the operation of the Act have shown that enforcement was neither complete nor uniform; local authorities failed to build the workhouses required by the Act and were therefore unable to make the invidious but (according to the Act) essential distinction between paupers (people destitute enough to qualify to enter these institutions), and the merely poor, who were supposed to fend for themselves. Instead, Guardians continued to give allowances from the poor rates without requiring that the recipients become paupers and enter the workhouse. While the English Poor Law between 1834 and 1860 was characterized by a situation of administrative variety and confusion as unions failed to comply with the 1834 Act, the economic crises of the 1860s produced important reforms: the Union Chargeability Act (1865) improved financing; many unions built modern workhouses; at the same time, collateral care for the needy such as the aged began to emerge within the Poor Law. Then in 1870 the central Poor Law authority announced a policy of strict enforcement, recommending the suspension of outdoor relief to the able-bodied, a far-reaching change in Poor Law practice.