In a recent article, Caroline M. Hibbard noted that recent work on Tudor-Stuart recusancy has focused on the enforcement of royal and statutory policy on the local level and has examined the social composition of the recusant community. These studies have revealed that the recusant community was not dominated by priests, not subject to the political directives of the papacy, and not plotting rebellion. The problem inherent in these local studies, as Professor Hibbard points out, is that they do not explain why the English were anti-Catholic and they do not examine the international character of the English Catholic Community. This article is an attempt to view the recusant problem from the perspective of the monarch and the privy council, because both monarch and privy council were aware of the international character of Catholicism and both stated clearly in their policies toward recusants the grounds of their objection to the Catholic community. An analysis of the recusancy policy established by Elizabeth between 1559 and 1574 reveals that her primary objection to the recusants was not religious but political. The recusants denied a fundamental claim of the monarch: the headship of the church and, therefore, the claim that the monarch was the source of all power within the realm. This article, then, will examine the ways in which she wished to contain a minority who denied her supreme power in the realm and the circumstances which caused the queen and the council to change that policy.

This article will explore the interplay between a traditional fête in Devon and Oxfordshire, the celebration of the Fifth of November, and the last significant wave of English food price disturbances in 1867. Both popular culture and collective action mutated, of course, as underlying economic and social structures changed; but even in those regions where the pace of change was rapid, to neglect the factors of persistence and survival would lead to a history written according to a too simplistic formula. To say that culture and collective action changed in the nineteenth century as society and the economy changed can even become a truism, telling little about the processes through which these relationships worked themselves out. Without overdrawing the case, an effort has been made here to focus precisely upon persistence and survival, and to show how, in regions such as the southwest or Oxfordshire—and by implication, many other regions of Britain as well—the pace of nineteenth century cultural, economic, and social change was more leisurely than studies based exclusively on the industrializing north might lead one to conclude.

Besides remaining the celebration of the failure of the Popish Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes acquired a number of new meanings for those involved in nineteenth century Fifth of November manifestations, and some other novel “uses” as well. Annual celebrations all over the south were frequently organized and mounted by secret or semi-secret societies of “bonfire boys” or “Guys.” Members of the bonfire gangs usually concealed their identities with masks or soot and appeared in uniform or grotesque costumes to preside over the collection of wood and other combustibles, the begging or extortion of money from the wealthy, and the fabrication of suitable effigies to be ritually consumed on the bonfire.

One striking feature of the debates in the early stages of the Long Parliament was the universality with which the policies of the Caroline bishops were condemned. There is no more vivid evidence of how widespread lay disaffection from the episcopal bench had become by 1640 than the breadth of criticism leveled against it from all sides of the Commons. The new model Anglicanism erected by archbishop Laud and his supporters was shown to be a jerry built facade, a cadre of generals without battalions, a clerical elite without a lay following.

Among those who most forcefully challenged the policies of the prelates was Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, scholar, author, and host of the Tew circle, that discussion group of liberal laymen and clerics, immortalized by Clarendon, which met at Falkland's country seat in Oxfordshire during the 1630s.1 His views were particularly important, first because he was widely respected for his integrity and seriousness of purpose. As C.V. Wedgwood points out, for example, “Falkland was one of those men who carry in their faces and manner the unmistakable marks of extreme conscientiousness. When Falkland spoke, it was not from impulse, but conviction. …” Second, Falkland was known to be latitudinarian in his opinions, thus not affected by dogmatism on the one hand or zealotry on the other. His ideas would consequently be all the more significant, since they represented the results of considered examination rather than the fruits of doctrinaire sentiment.

When Michael Drayton began work on Poly-Olbion, his vast poetic description of England and Wales, he committed himself to a course of action which was seriously to endanger his career. Drayton's reputation as a poet was injured by his faith in that strange, unfashionable poem, and he found himself increasingly out of touch with the main literary developments of his time. In his old age, fortunately, it led him to compose much of his most original and delicately beautiful poetry. The significance of Poly-Olbion in Drayton's life and art, however, has seldom been understood by the poet's biographers and critics, who have usually regarded it either as a charming eccentricity or as an unfortunate deviation from his true line of development. To Drayton, however, Poly-Olbion was his major work, innovating, he believed, a major new genre. When the first part was published in 1612, he boasted “My Poeme is genuine, and first in this kinde”; ten years later, bitter and depressed at its failure but determined to press on, he still proudly proclaimed that “it was a new cleere way, never before gone by any.” On its fortunes he was prepared to stake his literary reputation, and, as events were to prove, his commitment to “this strange Herculean toyle” (PO, 30:342) lasted well over thirty years.

Northop Frye has written that the epic, as Renaissance critics understood it, “is not a poem by a poet, but that poet's poem: he can never complete a second epic unless he is the equal of Homer, and hence the moment at which the epic poet chooses his subject is the crisis of his life. To decide to write an epic … is an act of considerable courage, because if one fails, one fails on a colossal scale.” The decision to write a poem on the scale of Poly-Olbion, whether “epic” in the strict sense of the word or not, involved Drayton in a similar risk. The spectres of ridicule and detraction haunted him for the rest of his life, and only his growing conviction of the political and literary importance of his magnum opus enabled him to continue writing.

Since the publication of J.H. Hexter's Reign of King Pym in 1941 the idea of a middle group has been a lynchpin of English Civil War historiography. Before Hexter historians believed that with the coming of the Civil War members of Parliament split into two factions, the war party and the peace party. Hexter, however, demolished this crude dualism by demonstrating the existence of a middle party in the early days of the Long Parliament, a group of hybrid of M.P.s who seemingly defied classification. Members such as John Glynn and John Clotworthy supported measures from both the war and peace parties.

While the composition of the middle group, especially on the fringes, shifted periodically, it maintained a basic core of members and a discernible ideology. Its outlook was moderate and best expressed in the Grand Remonstance and the Nineteen Propositions. The members identified with this middle group steadfastly upheld the constitution and the monarchy, but believed that specific limitations on the monarch must be implemented to preserve the constitution.

Perhaps inspired by the work of Hexter, other historians approached the Civil War era in similar fashion. Hexter believed that the middle group collapsed with Pym's death in 1643; yet Valerie Pearl has argued that it lingered oh through 1644 under the leadership of Oliver St. John. Following Pym's death, Pearl contended, St. John followed the moderate path prescribed by Pym in supporting measures from both the war and peace parties and by supporting the earl of Essex, the consensus choice for military commander.

For students interested in the political history of Britain during the early years of the Great War, Lord Beaverbrook's Politicians and the War, 1914-1916 is now essential reading. This, however, has not always been the case. The historiographical fortunes of this important study, Beaverbrook's modus operandi, and his preoccupations as a historian are the main concerns of this paper. Examination of these issues, combined with a reassessment of of certain key themes and incidents in Politicians and the War allow for a reevaluation not only of the book as a major source for the period but also of that wonderful and partisan fusion of politics and history who was Max Aitken, the first and only Lord Beaverbrook.

Beaverbrook, as A.J.P. Taylor's vast biography makes clear, was a man of many parts. Politics colored almost everything he did. His politics were those of the Unionist (later the Conservative) Party and, as a Canadian colonial who had come to Britain to augment further his considerable fortune, he identified strongly with the Tariff Reform wing of the party in the years before the First World War. He was Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyne from 1910 to 1916. Within the Unionist Party his closest friend was Andrew Bonar Law, another Canadian born politician, who in 1911 became Leader of the party and was thus a central figure in the tumultuous events examined in Politicians and the War. Aitken also had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Liberal Party. They, too, provided him with another perspective on the politics of the wartime period; one of them, David Lloyd George, in one of his earliest acts as Prime Minister in December 1916, elevated Aitken to the House of Lords where he took the title of Lord Beaverbrook.

In October of 1899 war broke out between Great Britain and the Transvaal Republic following a Boer attack upon Natal and Cape Colony. Thus opened what was destined to be the most melancholy chapter in imperial history.1 Although Britain ultimately achieved military victory, the circumstances surrounding the start of the war and the methods by which it was fought provoked serious domestic division and crisis, especially within the opposition Liberal party.

Because of the Boers' apparent aggression against British territory in South Africa, the majority of Britons, irrespective of social class, responded with an unprecedented display of outraged patriotism and national pride. The war was characterized by no less a critic than Keir Hardie as “the most popular ever waged in England.” “Mobs of workingmen”, he complained, “nightly invade and smash up public meetings held in the interests of peace and assault the speakers with stones.”

From the start, however, a small minority, derisively called pro-Boers, dissented from the national consensus, attacking Unionist policies and motives, and waging one of the most sustained anti-war campaigns in modern history. Though the movement encompassed socialists, trade unionists, clergymen, journalists, and a variety of intellectuals, at its core was a bloc of parliamentary Radicals and Lib-Labs which consistently espoused a position independent of the official Opposition. Variously denouncing the war as unwise, unnecessary, and unjust, the Radical bloc enunciated views during the war years which strikingly foreshadowed the anti-imperial rhetoric of a more modern era.

The articles that follow employ quantitative and prosopographical approaches that, although not new to historical investigation, are new to the field of royal-baronial relations in Norman England. Traditionally, English medieval politics have been treated with a strongly constitutional emphasis. Barons have been viewed as a largely undifferentiated group whose relations with the monarchy were seen as a reaction against the advance of rational central government, or as a defense of traditional liberties against oppressive kings.

The better historians, over the past century and more, have resisted such simplifications. John Horace Round, for example, attacked and ridiculed the anachronistic constitutional generalizations of some of his predecessors by producing a mass of detailed information on individual Anglo-Norman aristocratic families. Sir Frank Stenton, in a tribute to Round written soon after Round's death in 1928, summarized his contribution in these apt words:

Stenton, too, was an expert in aristocratic genealogy and family history; and with the sources of Saxon and Norman England at his fingertips, he was a master of the apt illustration.

Relationships between the representatives of British imperial expansion and the people of the regions which came under their influence have long been subjected to scholarly investigation. Such studies have focused on economic interdependencies, racial tensions, and military confrontations. In the case of India the best discussion of cultural interactions was presented fifty years ago by Percival Spear who examined the “social life of the English in eighteenth century India.” Spear was much concerned with the attitudes which the British developed towards the peoples of India in a period of transition which later led to “many of the problems of racial relations in India.” He pointed out that the early English traders were not burdened with color prejudice and were willing to adopt Indian customs when useful or profitable. As the number of Europeans, especially soldiers and women, increased in India, the early tolerance was overwhelmed by the view that Indian society was stagnant and morally inferior.

Subsequent evaluations of British attitudes in eighteenth century India have differed little from Spear's picture. George Bearce emphasized the sense of wonder many Englishmen held toward India and that their motivation in going there was primarily one of profit. He also underscored what Spear had previously noted, that “the British relied principally on British prejudices and thought, rather than a knowledge of India or standards devised from Indian experience.” The British believed that India had little to offer the West intellectually and that the climate combined with despotism had created a society incapable of change. There were rare exceptions to such generalizations, particularly in the period after Clive's success. Scholars such as William Jones and officials such as Warren Hastings came to have a greater appreciation for Indian culture. However, even Hastings measured Indian society by European standards, which led in less perceptive minds to “an acutely messianic form of racial pride and religious smugness.” By the turn of the nineteenth century most Europenas had adopted the “Peter Pan theory” of Asians as unchanging children. Subsequently, the inflexible attitudes of Evangelicals and Utilitarians produced “a ruling class consciously isolated and imbued with a sense of racial superiority.”

Propaganda overseas was vital to Britain in the Second World War. She could not easily confront her enemies alone and survive, much less win. It was imperative to keep her allies united, her empire and the commonwealth loyal, and neutrals benevolent—or perhaps, even, to get them committed to her side. These were the objectives of British propaganda overseas in war time. Despite foreign-office objections, the Committee of Imperial Defense (CID) in the mid-1930s gave responsibility for this work to the Ministry of Information (MOI), which was to be established on the outbreak of war. Meanwhile, ministry machinery had to be planned, and the policies which would govern its work had to be determined. These responsibilities were given in 1936 to Sir Stephen Tallents, public relations controller for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Britain's leading expert on advertising publicity. Yet, neither the machinery nor a policy was ready when the war began in September 1939. The ministry and the country, as Phillip M. Taylor has indicated, was inarticulate, if not quite speechless, at the start of the “war of words.” Britain was able only to conduct propaganda to enemy countries, because plans for that work earlier had been removed from MOI control.

Conflicts in the planning process created this situation in which two factors stand out. MOI planners were hampered at the start by departmental and personal feuding, which was permitted because no war emergency existed, and, after 1937, by the adherents of appeasement policy who dominated Whitehall. Stephen Tallents stood on the firing line most visibly as the government, led by an economy-minded treasury, discouraged planning any propaganda machinery for war time which might even hint at serious propaganda deployment in peace time.

Since the time of the British “Great Depression,” and with increasing urgency as the relative decline of the British economy has gathered pace in the twentieth century, economists and economic historians have sought to explain both depression and decline and to suggest remedies. Until recently, it has been fashionable to ascribe the decline to the failings of British management, often working in conjunction with workers and trade unions, and to focus attention particularly on the failure to innovate, to adopt inventions which would have significantly lowered British production costs and improved international competitiveness in the manufacturing industries which were the basis of British prosperity. In the last fifteen years, however, studies of specific industries and investment decisions have made this global explanation for British decline less attractive, so much so that a recent summary of these studies can conclude that:

Marriage has been a means of climbing the social ladder in most societies, and post-conquest England was no exception. The Conquest had provided a sweeping opportunity for men of all strata of the feudal hierarchy to gain lands and wealth in England, but high social status and prestige remained the prerogative of magnate families who had constituted the aristocracy of Normandy and northern France before 1066. Most of these families had themselves risen only recently to wealth and power through ducal patronage, but by 1066 they were firmly entrenched in their Norman estates and in the duke's inner circle of advisors. Many magnates possessed comital titles and ties of kinship with the Norman duke-kings, and all profited greatly from the Conqueror's victory at Hastings and his subsequent redistribution of English lands. Families such as the Beaumonts, Montgomerys, Clares, Mandevilles, and Warennes continued to enjoy the highest aristocratic honors in Anglo-Norman society.

In the second generation after the Conquest, a number of men of lower social standing amassed land and political importance through service to William Rufus and Henry I, desiring to be accepted as peers by the great magnates. Their striving for social success is illustrated by William of Malmesbury in his History of the Kings of England. In recounting the plan of William fitz Osbern to marry the widow of Count Baldwin of Flanders, the chronicler ascribed his motives to a desire “to increase his dignity.” Many men also wanted to impress the lower orders of society with their rank. Orderic Vitalis's contemptuous tale of one of Henry I's “new men,” Richard Basset, suggests that acquisition of social prestige was a possible motive for marriage. Having married a daughter of the earl of Chester, Basset returned to Normandy “and made a show of superiority to all his peers and fellow countrymen by the magnificence of his building in the little fief he had inherited from his parents.…”

To what extent were families important participants in the statecraft of Henry I? Their political influence, or clout, can best be measured by an examination of the rewards that the king bestowed upon their members for good service. Royal patronage could range from appointments to lucrative offices and marriages to heiresses to monetary gifts, pardoned debts, and exemptions from danegeld, auxilium burgi, and the murdum fine. Analysis of the Pipe Roll of 1130, the only surviving record of Henry's income and expenses, indicates that nearly seven hundred individuals received favors from the king in that account. The focus of this study shifts to royal patronage of the family groups to which these favored individuals belonged. Considered within the context of their domus, they form fifty-three fiscally-favored families and constitute the statistical sample upon which this analysis is based.

This study fits into the prosopographical framework envisioned by Timothy Reuter for the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and described by George Beech. The Pipe Roll of 1130, a document of impressive detail and accuracy, illustrates which families were powerful and in the king's good graces and is a rich source of familial activity. It provides a glimpse not only of the financial and political activities of great magnates such as Ranulf earl of Chester and Waleran count of Meulan, but of the endeavors of families of modest origins and moderate status as well. Furthermore, the Pipe Roll suggests that political service and its consequent rewards were not confined to a “closed group,” but that the power structure could include families of varied means.

During Henry I's reign the Anglo-Norman nobility as a group was changing, reflecting twelfth-century demographic, military, and cultural changes, but also responding to specifically “English” developments in royal government. Increasingly, the king relied upon a group of men, familiares, most of whom were more dependent upon royal favor than their own patrimony for their position in society. The king's use of patronage in turn affected the composition of the nobility by creating nobles or providing the means for mobility within the class. To what extent, however, did this occur, and could anyone rely on the king and his court to be the major source of mobility and wealth? To find out it is necessary to see who within the nobility benefitted the most from different types of royal favor, and whether Henry I's familiares formed a separate group or network within the nobility, set apart not only by their curial behavior but by their feudal and family connections. It is an aspect of the family behavior which will be examined here and be fit into the larger question in subsequent work.

If the familiares received favor desired by others and did not blend into the larger class through lifestyle and alliances then they were an obvious target for anti-royal sentiment. R.W. Southern, in the article which in many ways revived Anglo-Norman historical inquiry, showed how a few familiares did rise to great and obvious wealth through royal favor. Administrative developments affected not only individuals—“new men,” “old men”—but families.