A few years ago the iconoclastic architectural scholar Reyner Banham declared: William Morris's “ruralizing vision of John Ball's other island as a vast medieval dude-ranch full of bit players addressing one another as ‘Neighbour’ just doesn't stand up.” Surely not, if this indeed was Morris's vision. Yet did this vision originate with Morris or with certain of his interpreters?

E. P. Thompson has called attention to the growth of a “Morris myth.” Thompson argued that William Morris's revolutionism, and specifically, Marxism, had been buried under layers of praise (and disparagement) for a fictitious—and socially harmless—character. This mythic Morris was a mixture of romantic poet and traditional craftsman, in love with old English countryside and old English folk life. As such, he could be—and was—embraced by Liberals, Tories, and right-wing socialists.

Thompson's observation was not the first such, nor the last. By now these protests have altered the commonly accepted view of Morris, and we see the revolutionary within the medievalist, the communist within the craftsman. Yet no one has asked why the myth flourished. Thompson, like R. Page Arnot more briefly before him, saw this myth, properly, as something more than a simple mistake. Thompson followed the Marxist lead of Arnot in implying deliberate distortion for class purposes.

The most recent biography of Lord Durham begins with a comparison between the affection felt by the people of his county for Squire Lambton, and the lack of attention paid by the nation to the co-author of the first Reform Act and the author of the Durham Report. A neo-Grecian temple, built by the Freemasons of county Durham, overlooking his seat at Chester-Le-Street is visible for miles, and provides a stark contrast to the London town house at 13 Cleveland Row, which lacks even the familiar blue plaque to serve as a reminder that Radical Jack once lived there. The illustration is apt. Traditional deference paid by a county to a “friend of the people” who made his mark in the larger world accounts perhaps for the existence of the temple; less easily explained is his failure to earn that respect usually accorded a public figure of his significance, and it is curious, at first glance, that a man of his abilities and achievements should be regarded as an outcast by his own government. Yet the fact remains that for most of the 1830's, Durham was regarded as little more than a nuisance by his colleagues, who, following the passage of the Reform Bill, entrusted him to no position of authority in England.

The women's suffrage movement in Great Britain has suffered from the misconception that it was through the urgings, exertions, and sacrifices of women exclusively prior to 1918 that the vote was finally achieved. Such writers as the Pankhursts and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who were also participants in the struggle, have set the tone of historical interpretation by describing their success in such titular terms as My Own Story,…The Story of How We Won the Vote, and Women's Victory…, a lead dutifully followed by others who have written since the passage of the Reform Bill. Almost without exception these accounts, which include Roger Fulford's Votes For Women, stress the more exciting prewar aspects of the story, thereby conveying the mistaken impression that the conferral of the suffrage was the natural consequence of feminist agitation. Those more enlightened authors who recognize the adverse effect which the militant suffragists had on their own cause and the absence of any kind of solicitation during the war have subscribed to the equally misleading explanation that it was women's participation in the war which won the vote. Such is the perspective gained from reading Monstrous Regiment by David Mitchell. A close examination of the politics of the reform question, an approach heretofore eschewed by nearly every writer of the period, reveals that the extension of the suffrage to women did not “just happen” as a result of the manifold conversions in political and public spheres, for whatever reason. Indeed the question of giving women the vote would never have arisen during the war had Parliament not been confronted with the urgency of granting the vote to soldiers and sailors on active duty.

The Cabinet crisis of 1903 was an event of major significance in recent British political history. The Annual Register declared of the 1903 crisis that it was “one of the most sensational political events recorded in the long series of volumes of the Annual Register.” Randolph Churchill, in his great biography of his father, referred to the crisis as a “remarkable and probably unique series of events.” Lord Blake, in The Observer, wrote that it was one of “the most drastic series of expulsions, resignations and reshuffles engineered by any Prime Minister in the twentieth century.” The present writer in a book entitled Balfour's Burden wrote of the 1903 crisis that “this Cabinet was a decisive moment in British history. Ministers had come together in order to decide upon the economic and Imperial future of their country.”

Historians have always recognised the high importance of the 1903 crisis in British affairs. But they have been unable to agree upon the details of it, and they have differed regularly about the role in it played by Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister of the day. Nevertheless, material in the Public Record Office in London, recently made available to scholars, now enables us to resolve the differences which have occupied the attention of scholars for a long time past. Nor is it simply a matter of detail. Significant conclusions about British political practice can be made when the crisis of 1903 is understood, in all its aspects. The crisis occurred as the result of British failures during the Boer War which revealed that Britain was either unable or unprepared to defend the distant reaches of her Empire. Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary, resolved to restore the situation.