This paper approaches a large problem — the changing image of late Anglo-Saxon kingship — from a very limited perspective. In later work I hope to study Alfred's changing image as a symbol of kingship within its broader political context. This paper is limited to studying the changing relationship between Crown and monastery, as illustrated by the portrayal of King Alfred in a pair of late-Saxon saint's lives.

Historians owe most of their knowledge of King Alfred to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of Alfred, both generally agreed to be products of Alfred's own court. Given the detail of these works and their status as “official histories,” it might be expected that all subsequent treatments of King Alfred depend on them. Yet the most popular episode of Alfred's life, the one still known by every English schoolchild, is the story of Alfred and the cakes, which occurs nowhere in these authoritative sources. In fact, by the end of the tenth century King Alfred emerges in literary contexts far from the West Saxon court, engaging in activities that are certainly not recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Life of Alfred. What had taken place to give Alfred this life of his own outside of the official histories?

With the recent four hundredth anniversary of the sailing of the Spanish Armada came a virtual flood of new works concerning the great invasion fleet and the English ships that opposed it. While it would seem that there would be little new to say about such a heavily researched subject, there is one aspect of this momentous year that has been received relatively short shrift by historians of the period, the national mobilization of England to meet the threatened invasion. Often referred to as the Great Muster of 1588 because one of its most important elements was the muster of the militia to fill the ranks of the army, it was an administrative feat of massive scope that involved months of preparation, extensive military planning, and precise timing. Because these arrangements were never tested in battle, however, the effectiveness of this effort is hard to judge, and its importance is often missed by historians. While Garrett Mattingly devoted an entire chapter of his well known work on the Armada year to events on land, he found the queen's visit to the army at Tilbury after the departure of the Armada more important, or at least more interesting, than the actual state of the nation's defense. More recently, Geoffrey Parker has used the discovery of a large quantity of siege equipment on an excavated armada wreck as a jumping off point for his article “If The Armada Had Landed.” Approaching the issue from the standpoint of a historian of the Army of Flanders, and leaning heavily on continental sources, he adheres to the view that England was totally unprepared for fighting on land if the Spanish had succeeded in landing troops on the island. While this view reflects the common opinion of both nineteenthand twentieth-century historians on the subject, a careful review of English sources, particularly the surviving muster records, military papers, and coastal surveys, leaves a good deal of doubt concerning the accuracy of Parker's judgment. It is the purpose of this article to examine the English side of the story of the Great Muster of 1588, by illustrating the extensive defensive preparations that were organized to face the Spanish threat.

The search for the origins of modern democratic institutions, institutions grounded in what philosophers call “legitimation by consent,” has led historians far upstream into numerous tributaries. Francis Oakley argues that the institutional, practical, and political world in which Romano-canonist theories of consent were actually put to the test, could be found in ecclesiastical communities, the feudal contract, the conciliar movement, and “a myriad of corporate bodies and of cities enjoying de facto an extensive measure of self-governance.” The medieval English village was certainly one of the most important of these corporate bodies. As early as 1933, following in the path of the great nineteenth-century constitutional historians, A. B. White looked in the direction of the medieval village for indications of nascent institutions of self government. However, White devalued the significance of his own findings by arguing that this “self-government” developed in response to the needs of royal administrators, and was, in the end, overshadowed by the centralized power of a Tudor regime. White thus saw village institutions of self government as responses on the part of a local population to “the King's command.”

Many charges were leveled against Piers Gaveston, the Gascon favorite of Edward II and earl of Cornwall from 1307 until his violent death at the hands of a group of disaffected magnates led by earls Thomas of Lancaster and Guy of Warwick in 1312. One of the most readily accepted has been the accusation that he had maliciously and illegally taken the royal treasure into his own hands and that he had then transported the treasure to his native Gascony. According to the contemporary Annales Londonienses, no sooner had Gaveston been recalled from exile than Edward bestowed the royal treasure upon him in its entirety: “Furthermore he has relinquished to the said Piers the disposition and control of all the royal treasure, jewels, and precious stones.” Other chronicles refer to Gaveston's acquisition of the royal treasure in 1307, linking it to the fall from grace of Edward I's former treasurer, Walter Langton, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield (but most often styled bishop of Chester in contemporary accounts of the reign). According to the Annales Paulini, Gaveston, still not satisfied, induced Edward to give him the wedding gifts that the king had received from his new father-in-law, Philip the Fair of France. Moreover, the earl of Cornwall was supposed to have sent this treasure abroad resulting in the pauperization of both king and Crown. To the monastic chroniclers of the fourteenth century, and indeed to the magnates who drafted the Ordinances of 1311, the veracity of these allegations was too well established to require specific proof. Modern scholars, however, require more concrete evidence than the narrative sources supply of Gaveston's alleged wrongdoing. Documentary evidence sheds light upon the various questions revolving around Piers Gaveston and the royal treasure.

In his attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Dr. De Puebla, Spain's first resident ambassador to England, Garrett Mattingly dismissed as unimportant certain unflattering remarks about the envoy made by a royal councillor to two Spanish officials, who knew the councillor as Dr. Pedro Panec. Mattingly, unable to identify Panec, believed him to be insignificant in Tudor service and, therefore, his remarks to be uninformed. Nonetheless, the available sources reveal Pierre Le Pennec as the Spaniards' Dr. Panec, a cleric and lawyer from Morlaix, doctor of civil and canon laws, prothonotary of the Roman Church, king's clerk and councillor, and political agent in Henry VII's foreign service.

Historians of early Tudor diplomacy (when the term is not used interchangeably with foreign policy) have focused on the routine functions of ordinary diplomatic representatives, but Pennec has not merited the interest of Tudor diplomatic historians because he did not serve extensively as one of the king's ordinary diplomats. His only ordinary diplomatic function was in 1499 when he carried procuratorial letters to the Roman Curia for Henry VII.

The conception of English culture in the century that was brought to a climax in Cromwellian triumph and tragedy has suffered from a flatness of historical perception, one major cause of which has been insufficient recognition of the thought and esthetic creativity of nominal Christian and emphatically non-Puritan intellectuals and artists. We have concentrated too much on defining the novelties, indeed often inappreciable differences, that characterized pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Christian factionalism in England: Anglicanism, Puritanism, Sectarianism, Laudianism, and now Arminianism. I want instead to make a case for the neglected power, pervasiveness, and perdurability of varieties of secularism in the age of the Godly.

Although a growing number of scholars are aware of the importance of literature to the dynamics of this astonishing epoch, the redoubtable spirit of William Haller prevails still in historical efforts to reconstitute the cultural context of that literature. The pagan bedrock laid down by a century of humanist imports is obscured by the flood of ephemeral sermons and miscellaneous religious discourse. Recent literary scholarship, on the other hand, having shaken the incubus of F. R. Leavis and not yet succumbed to post-structuralism, has given us models with which to illuminate prerevolutionary English culture: the monographs of Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stephen Orgel investigate the penetration of secular humanism into literature, historical writing,and popular and court theatre. They could lead us out of the fog created by the supersaturated climate of Protestant culture.

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.

The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.

Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

My past attacks on the use of hindsight as a tool for explaining the parliamentary politics of the 1620s were not based on any desire to evade the task of explaining the English Civil War. They were based on the belief that it was necessary to understand what did happen in the 1620s before it could become possible to use those events to shed light on the English Civil War. The argument was that the search for the causes of the Civil War had impeded any attempt to see the 1620s as they actually were. That was why I attempted to find out what had happened in the 1620s as a task in its own right, before going on to investigate the coming and the causes of the English Civil War.

It is only because I have already attempted both these questions, and provided answers at least to my own satisfaction, that I now feel free to look back again at the 1620s, and attempt to ask the question what issues, and what attitudes, distinguish a future Royalist from a future Parliamentarian during those years. This is, of course, a very different question from asking what were the key issues of the 1620s. Very often, the issues that transpire to be the best predictors of Civil War allegiance were, at the time, low-priority and poorly reported issues. Attempts to investigate them are not meant to endow them with an importance they did not necessarily possess at the time, nor to suggest any inevitability about the division of England along the lines they suggest. The Civil War was only one of many ways in which the English body politic might have been divided: under a different king, for example, quite different disagreements might have been forced to the surface as the agenda developed. Yet, once it is granted this is not the only way Englishmen might have been divided, it is still worth asking whether the division that actually surfaced corresponds to any visible division in the politics of the 1620s. None of this is an attempt to reopen the debate on “revisionism” in the 1620s. That debate has now acquired a half life of its own, and this article is not intended to take any part in it. It is, though, inevitably informed by thirteen years' work on the politics of the Long Parliament, and so incorporates perceptions of how different the 1620s were from the 1640s, which no other programme of work could have made equally intense.

Despite the extensive critical attention that has been lavished upon Sir Thomas More's Utopia, the influence of the early historical narratives of the discovery and conquest of America on the shaping of his fictional commonwealth remains problematic. Proctor Fenn Sherwin, writing in 1917, declared that “it should go without saying” that “the yet novel discoveries of unknown and unguessed of peoples in America and the tales of Spanish explorers” were a “considerable inspiration” to More. But Sherwin admitted that, apart from a few references to Amerigo Vespucci's Four Voyages, he could find no echo of their writings in the text of Utopia. Subsequent research on the rich literary allusions in More's published works and unpublished correspondence has provided some fascinating insights into his remarkable erudition and complex character. It has also prompted extensive debate about the relative importance of various classical and medieval sources in inspiring More's celebrated but enigmatic fictional account of an imaginary commonwealth. But no new evidence demonstrating that More was in fact steeped in the early literature on the New World has been produced. Claims that he read Columbus and Peter Martyr as well as Vespucci remain unsubstantiated.

Some commentators have been untroubled by that lack of evidence. H. L. Donner assumed that More was familiar with Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World and from that source learned that the Indians of the West Indies “had an intuitive knowledge of the most essential moral and philosophical truths.” Donner concluded that More modelled Utopian “morality and religion” in large measure on Peter Martyr's description of the West Indians.

Andrew Marvell's “An Horatian ode upon Cromwel's return from Ireland” may not be the most famous seventeenth-century poem but it is perhaps the most enigmatic. Its elusive, haunting quality defies any strict interpretation, and, as Blair Worden has recently indicated, the poem refuses to fall neatly into any simple “royalist” or “Cromwellian” category. Rather, the “Horatian Ode” has the aspect of a cultural artifact, having captured and held the historical moment that tore asunder two ages: the pre-1649 past of hereditary monarchy with its confidence in the traditions bequeathed by time, and the immediate post-1649 future, when the English state was to be governed by brute strength and naked power. As such, it has become a testament to the “fundamental shift in English civilization, that when every reservation has been made, the middle of the seventeenth century brought about.” For Worden “An Horatian Ode,” with its ambivalent stance of neither approval nor condemnation of the rise of Cromwell, epitomizes the state of Renaissance poetry before T. S. Eliot's much lamented “disassociation of sensibility” took place.

A number of Victorian writers identified a change in the episcopate in the nineteenth century: Dean Burgon, for example, believed that a remodeled episcopacy emerged at this time. Historians have advanced the view that the changes were generated by the Whig ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s. Indeed it is part of the schemata of ecclesiastical history that bishops in the eighteenth century were fundamentally different from those in the nineteenth century. Yet, as C. K. Francis Brown admitted, there has been no attempt to establish a pattern of this in the career and social history of the nineteenth century episcopate. This is all the more surprising since a structuralist analysis of the Caroline and Hanoverian episcopate has existed for some years. The traditional view of Church history, that the ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s were the principal engine of change, have tended to overlook the structural changes in bishops' career patterns and that there was a change in the concept of the episcopal function. The context of this changed concept of episcopal duty is important. Recent work on the professionalization of the clergy has focused on the immediate impact of the Reformation and the development of the Church as a profession up to the early eighteenth century. Rosemary O'Day and Geoffrey Holmes have demonstrated that between 1580 and 1730 the clerical profession became increasingly stratified. The overpopulation of the clergy in the eighteenth century accelerated this trend, establishing a Church in which there were extremes of wealth and poverty. At the same time the clergy were subject to greater lay control than any other emergent profession. This tension between professionalization and institutions of the state has been examined in other occupations, but throughout the nineteenth century it grew stronger in the Church. From patronage of a living to nomination to a see, laity dominated the Church. In spite of Whig reforms of the 1830s and 1840s lay control established strict parameters within which the professionalization of the episcopate occurred. The effect of control from outside the Church was that the paths to the bench of bishops remained more numerous and varied than the limited paths to the elite of other professions like the judiciary. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw functional trends that brought about the professionalization of the clergy. These changes have been thoroughly analyzed by Anthony Russell. The self-conscious spirituality of the Tractarian movement also effected changes in the popular view of the clerical function, and the episcopate was not immune to these changes. By the closing decades of the nineteenth-century bishops were appointed whose careers had been touched by these trends. Equally important were developments within the episcopate that altered the bishops' roles.

In Tudor Prelates and Politics, Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote sympathetically of the dilemma faced by the conservative bishops who saw control over the Church of England slip from their grasp after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, but he gave less attention to the reforming bishops who worked to advance the Protestant cause. At the beginning of the new reign the episcopal bench, according to Smith's calculations, included twelve conservatives, seven reformers, and seven whose religious orientation could not be determined (see Table 1). The ranks of the conservatives were thinned as a consequence of the deprivation of Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, Edmund Bonner of London, Nicholas Heath of Worcester, George Day of Chichester, and Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham. On the other hand, eight new bishops were appointed between 1547 and 1553. These new men together with the Henrician reformers, of whom Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was most important, had responsibility for leading the church during the period which saw the most extensive changes of the Reformation era. This essay examines the careers of the newly-appointed reforming bishops and attempts to assess their achievements and failures as they worked to create a reformed church in England.

The first of the eight new bishops appointed during the reign of Edward VI was Nicholas Ridley, who was named Bishop of Rochester in 1547 and translated to London in 1550. In 1548 Robert Ferrar became Bishop of St. David's in Wales. No new episcopal appointments occurred in 1549, but during the following year John Ponet succeeded Ridley at Rochester while John Hooper took the see of Gloucester.

A dozen years ago Conrad Russell initiated a major historiographical debate when he rejected the traditional interpretation of seventeenth-century parliamentary history expounded in the classic studies of S. R. Gardiner and Wallace Notestein, whose work on early Stuart parliaments dominated the field for three quarters of a century. According to Russell, Gardiner's and Notestein's conviction that Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were the scene of escalating constitutional conflicts between the Crown and the House of Commons was the result of the two historians' failure to understand either the nature of early Stuart politics or seventeenth-century notions of Parliament's proper functions. Politics in general and parliamentary politics in particular were devoid of ideological content, and the provincial gentry who filled the benches of the House of Commons were as certain as the rest of their countrymen that the “proper business” of Parliament was the passing of bills, not the debating of issues of national or constitutional significance. Russell, of course, did not suggest that the conflicts so crucial to the traditional interpretation were made out of whole cloth, but he did deny that disagreements between Crown and Parliament were due to the emergence of a constitutional opposition. Instead, such disagreements were the inevitable product of the pervasive tension that marked the relationship between the royal government in London and the local communities in the provinces. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Crown's incompetent parliamentary management made it more difficult than usual for local gentlemen to reconcile their obligations to their king with their loyalties to their communities. The result was some remarkably unhappy parliaments, but since no important issue of principle divided parliamentary leaders from privy councilors or officers of state, there could be no organized, ideologically based opposition, no constitutional crisis leading inexorably to civil war.

In the past twenty years there has been a renaissance in Jacobite studies in Britain and North America. It started with the publication in 1970 of Romney Sedgwick's The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754, in which the post-1715 Tory party was resurrected from the untimely death to which earlier historiography had consigned it in the face of the so-called Whig hegemony under Walpole and his successors. This section of Sedgwick's volumes was the work of Eveline Cruickshanks, who not only showed that there had been an active Tory party under Walpole, but also claimed that it had been essentially a Jacobite party. Dr. Cruickshanks has, since 1970, produced a book, several articles, and essays expanding her thesis. She has been joined in the quest for Jacobites by many others, and the flow of work on Jacobitism seems unabated. This body of work has, however, left other historians with a good deal of unease, not only over the conclusions reached, but also the methodology used and the sources upon which these conclusions are based (most notably the uncritical use of the Stuart Papers in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle).

The licentious career of Caroline of Brunswick, the most notorious queen in modern British history, was only exceeded by that of her husband, George IV, and the scandal that emerged when he attempted to obtain a divorce inspired one of the most unusual episodes of nineteenth-century British history. For six months the attention of the country was focused on the queen's trial; massive demonstrations in her support were familiar sights in London streets and news of the matter dominated the columns of the press. The popular outpouring of support for the queen often took the form of reviling the king and his ministers, and revolution seemed to be in the air, yet because no lasting political change resulted from this tumult, historians have tended to dismiss the affair as relatively unimportant. However, to view this interlude primarily in terms of party politics is to overlook the fact that the majority of the people who formed the massive crowds that so alarmed the government were neither radicals nor reformers, and many, if not most of them were unenfranchised. In order to better understand the implications of this unrest, it is important to identify those factors that inspired British men and women to openly denigrate their ruler and to heap opprobrium on the members of government in defense of a woman who, ironically, many believed to be guilty as charged. Such an examination makes it clear that this was an event of profound cultural significance and was in some respects the first wide-spread popular expression of the moral standards that have come to be labelled “Victorian.”

Any attempt to judge “public opinion” is fraught with difficulty. Most of the surviving journals, memoirs, and collections of letters from this period were written by members of the gentry and aristocracy; most of the middle and working-class people who actively demonstrated in support of the queen or who signed the numerous addresses sent to her have tended to remain silent and anonymous. Newspaper and other written accounts of the affair were often extremely partisan, for British society was sharply divided on this issue. Political caricatures, however, overcome some of these difficulties.

The accession of William III began a revolution in English foreign policy. Under the Dutch king's auspices England joined a Grand Alliance against the France of Louis XIV and shouldered the burdens of a principal partner in a major continental war. Not only did the war place grave financial strains upon the state; the formulation, administration, and execution of war policy also became areas of continual concern. These concerns combined to raise general questions about England's proper role in European affairs and about the proper application of English power in service of those interests. They also cast William III and the politicians into a constitutional no-man's land in which the royal monopoly over war and peace had to contest with the need to secure annual supplies. It has been the historian's task to explain how William III's “continental commitment” to land warfare, alliances, and defense of European liberties survived this political struggle.

In June 1914 David Lloyd George, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, capitulated to opposition from within his own party and withdrew from the Budget for 1914–15 his proposals to revise the system of Exchequer grants to local authorities and to establish land value rating. Withdrawal was a considerable political humiliation for Lloyd George. “His stock stands low in the party,” commented his friend, Lord Riddell, in his diary. “The Budget has been a fiasco.” What went wrong with the 1914 Budget is the concern of this article.

Lloyd George's 1914 Budget incorporated two distinct strategies. The first comprised a fiscal strategy designed to provide in a single “taxing” Budget for the needs of both the Navy and the reorganization of local government finance and taxation. The second constituted part of a wider political strategy intended to furnish a reform program that would enable the Liberals to make a powerful progressive appeal at the next general election, due by the end of 1915. The first was supposed to serve the second, but in the event had the opposite result. It prompted Lloyd George to abandon his original plan of building up to a major reform Budget in 1915 and to proceed instead to include in the 1914 Budget “provisional” grants to local authorities before he had prepared the groundwork, administratively, legislatively or politically, for a new system of grants and rating. At all levels, the enterprise was premature, and simply presented a group of discontented wealthy Liberals in the Commons with the opportunity to stage an effective protest against the direction of Liberal finance.

Is free market capitalism intrinsically inimical to culture and learning? The question probably would not have occurred to many people twenty years ago. That it can be seriously put today is a sign of the times. Two things have happened to Britain over the past decade. One is the political revival of the idea of the “market,” under the aegis of probably the most zealous capitalist ideologues ever to take power in what had generally been a fairly pragmatic political culture before then. The second is a scries of damaging cuts, or what are claimed to be damaging cuts, in the public funding of higher education and the arts. Some of the victims of the latter have perceived behind them a positive antipathy on the part of the zealots to what they are doing and what they hold dear. If this is so, then where does it derive from? The personal idiosyncrasies of the zealots? Simple economic necessity? A genuine belief in alternative and perhaps better ways of supporting learning and culture? Or is free market capitalism fundamentally philistine?

The question has come up before. In the nineteenth century people also remarked on the cultural barrenness of their time. There can be no doubt that it was pretty barren in certain areas. Compared with the European continent, and with her own past, Britain was something of a cultural desert during most of the century, and particularly between the 1840s and the 1880s, which are usually regarded as the high plateau of her free market capitalism.