The scene is familiar to most students of English history. In 664 A.D. the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and his son Alhfrith met with their clergy at Whitby to resolve (in Bede's words) “a great and active controversy about the keeping of Easter.” Oswiu, who presided over the council, listened patiently to a long and often bitter debate between the Irish and Roman advocates. On the surface, it was an unequal contest, for the traditions of Iona were upheld by the king's own bishop, Colman, while those of Rome were championed by a young abbot, Wilfrid, a protege of Alhfrith. But once again David slew Goliath. Oswiu, fearing for the welfare of his soul, pronounced in favor of the Apostle Peter, the “hostiarius … qui claues tenere probatur,” thus turning his back on his own childhood teachings. “When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognized to be better.”

Bede portrayed the Council of Whitby as the decisive confrontation in his native Northumbria between the rival ecclesiastical traditions of Rome and Iona. For him, the Roman triumph, the climax of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, signified that the Northumbrian church would no longer be guided by “a handful of people in the remotest of islands,” but would rejoin the “catholic and apostolic" Church of Christ. Oswiu's dramatic conversion at Whitby was thus a crucial step in the growth of Christian unity in the British Isles.

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.

In the mélange of conflicting theories on the origins of the English Civil War, a number of English social groups have received scrupulous attention. Storms have brewed over the gentry, the aristocracy, and more recently, “the middle sort of people” in town and countryside. Even the rural peasantry, traditionally neglected by historians, have not been overlooked in the most recent debates. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the English professional classes although studies of the clerical and legal professions have been forthcoming of late. Perhaps worst served of all in the ongoing war of scholars has been the English medical profession. The recent historiography on English physicians and their relationship to the Civil War can be briefly summarized.

The little work that has been done on professional physicians revolves almost exclusively around the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1964, in a distinguished history of the college, Sir George Clark suggested that the fellowship probably leaned to the royalist cause, but out of political expediency accommodated itself to the reality of parliament's power in the City of London. Referring to the events of 1642 and 1643, Clark wrote:

The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age of laissez-faire” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.

The term laissez-faire has been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.

The most influential case for an “age of laissez-faire” was presented by Dicey in Law and Public Opinion. In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.

Wilkie Collins's Victorian novel The Woman in White contains a scene in which the hero unknowingly aids the woman of the title, Anne Catherick, to escape from an asylum. When he learns that she was an escaped patient, he reflects on his action: “what had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?” The question was one which, less directly, confronted Victorian society as a whole. The nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of an asylum system designed “mercifully to control” the insane, a development of which many Englishmen felt proud. Yet this pride was often accompanied by an endemic, nagging fear that persons were being improperly confined in asylums. Occasionally, the exposure of some apparently egregious case of wrongful confinement raised these fears to epidemic proportions and produced what the Victorians called “lunacy panics.” These outbursts of public rage symptomized the tensions within a society determined to ban the mad from its midst, yet uncertain of the boundaries of madness, skeptical of the abilities of those it had chosen to draw those boundaries, and undecided as to the actual purposes of confinement. Indeed, the Victorians never clearly established what they meant by “wrongful” confinement. At times they seemed to mean the confinement of the sane; at other times they seemed to include those who were insane but not manifestly dangerous.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was elected leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons in January 1899, the party already was divided over the issue of imperialism. By the end of the year, the Boer War had accentuated that division. During the next six years, this disagreement over imperial policy was converted into a struggle between CB (as he was known to his contemporaries) and the Liberal Imperialists for control of the Liberal party. In the course of that struggle, Lord Rosebery, the leader of the Liberal Imperialists, repudiated CB's leadership; the Liberal Imperialists established their own organization, the Liberal League; and finally, the three most prominent Liberal Imperialists in the House of Commons—H.H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and R.B. Haldane—tried to force CB to become a prime minister in the House of Lords before they would serve under him.

Despite the obvious talents of the men involved, the Liberal Imperialists failed in their efforts either to capture the Liberal party or to dislodge CB from his position as leader. Because CB's leadership in opposition has seemed weak, there has been a tendency, even on the part of his sympathetic biographers, to attribute his success in beating back the Liberal Imperialist challenge to pluck and luck rather than to political skill. CB was plucky in his willingness to stick with the thankless task of leading a divided party whose most prominent members—Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, and John Morley—insisted on acting as alternatives to CB both as definers of policy and as focuses for the loyalty of Liberal M.P.s. CB was lucky in that the actions of the Unionist government of 1902-1905 reunited the fractured Liberals.

It has long been recognized that British central administration rarely undergoes radical upheaval. Major changes tend to occur in a cumulative or incremental manner, rather than being imposed suddenly as part of a politically-inspired program of reform. Even when the tempo of change in Whitehall has been at its quickest, for example in the two world wars, the dominant pattern has been for ad hoc adaptation of existing practices or for uncoordinated improvisations. All this is in character for a country whose political system is determined less by institutional frameworks or legal codifications than by ever subtly changing codes of practice or conventions. As a result, however, it is not unknown for significant changes in the workings of Whitehall to go largely unnoticed by contemporaries. It is argued here that one such development was the transformation in the inter-war period of the Treasury and of the higher civil service which was presided over by Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 1919 to 1939.

The extent and significance of these changes has tended to be masked even for later historians by the more obvious upheavals in both the work and organization of departments during each of the world wars. However, the changes wrought by Fisher and his associates had repercussions far beyond the confines of the Treasury itself. Five interrelated developments can be traced during this period.