Walter Bagehot divided the English constitution into two parts, the “dignified” and the “efficient.” The sovereign and the House of Lords were the dignified or the showy parts, imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress an uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the real work went on, where men of business transacted affairs of state using the authority obtained by the dignified parts. So he wrote in the years preceding the second Reform Bill, when it was conventional to speak of the rudeness and unruliness of an uneducated people and of the hazards of admitting them to the franchise. Yet his book, animated in such large measure by the debates on parliamentary reform of the late 1860s, remains a much-quoted authority on the English constitution today.

Perhaps one among the reasons for its enduring popularity is that he expressed so neatly a notion that certainly existed before as well as in his time and that survives today, namely, that governmental activity can be divided into ceremonial and political parts. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion is to reality, as artifice is to plain speaking. In affairs of state, the adjective “ceremonial,” when attached to words like “head of state” or “official,” has come to mean empty figurehead or powerless placeholder. Ceremonies of state—coronations, jubilees, openings of Parliament—are picturesque and pleasant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything powerful other than that which is powerfully sentimental, colorful, and evocative.

Historians of the medieval English peasantry have tended to assume that the history of peasants and their culture can best be revealed through the history of the village as a social and economic unit. As a result, the important recent advances in our understanding of peasant culture have been made by historians who, borrowing heavily from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, have written studies of particular villages or small towns. The mystique of the “village community” has retained a hold on the historian's imagination. Even as the peasant and his family now attract more attention from scholars, studies of family size, household structure, and inheritance and marriage patterns are usually carried out within the context of a particular village or small town, largely because collections of local records naturally coalesce around a parish name. These close examinations of specific vills have been made possible primarily through the exploitation of the village court rolls that survive from the mid-thirteenth century. Ironically, it has been these very village court rolls that, in the end, have forcefully demonstrated that the assumptions identifying peasant history with village history must now be abandoned.

The numerous studies of medieval English villages that have made possible the study of peasant family structure and behavior are now demonstrating that the history of the peasant family and the history of the particular village must part company. Certainly, the study of a single series of village court rolls makes possible the discovery within the village of family groups with characteristic behavior patterns.

In his presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, G. R. Elton drew attention to the “points of contact” in Tudor central government, namely, the relations of court, council, and Parliament. Among other things, Elton's discussion revealed the need to integrate more fully the often separately related histories of those institutions. Although such an integrated history obviously lies beyond the scope of this essay, part of the subject, Privy Chamber finance, introduces an important, if often secret, point of contact between officers of the royal household and officers of “state”—the management of the king's money. A declaration of money disbursed from Henry VIII's Privy Coffers in 1542–48 and an audit of Edward VI's Privy Purse for the years 1550–51, both discussed here for the first time, disclose some previously unknown aspects of early Tudor government and finance. Taken together, these documents should provide the basis for a deeper appreciation of the dynamics of the English Reformation regime.

I

Research of the past decade has revealed the place and importance of the Privy Chamber in the household and government of the Tudor kings. By 1540 a heretofore informal group of the king's body servants and boon companions had acquired wages and administrative functions to match their royally bestowed places and titles. The officers and staff of the king's private apartments now constituted a separate department of the royal household. Of the eighteen gentlemen in ordinary (i.e., in wages), two were honored by the title “chief” because of the intimate nature of their attendance on the king's person. One of them, the groom of the stool, became, ex officio, “first” gentleman.

In the election campaign of 1859, after twenty-five years of tirelessly defending the church rate principle that ratepayers of all religious denominations were liable to the rate levied for the maintenance of Anglican parish churches, Lord John Russell declared that he had come to favor abolishing church rates. The Tory Standard railed that the aging statesman had caved in to “senile ambition,” while another conservative critic charged that Russell had agreed to sacrifice church rates at the Willis's Rooms meeting in 1859 as part of a deal made to win the political support of Protestant Nonconformists. Spencer Walpole, the High Church chancellor of the Exchequer, was more charitable and more accurate, however, when after the election he responded to Russell's decision by acknowledging that the establishment was indebted to Russell for stalwartly having defended the church rate for decades as a bulwark of the church establishment.

Although Russell was too clever a politician to disregard political advantage or public opinion during his quarter-century fight to retain church rates, it was not his Whig politics but his Broad Church ecclesiology that best accounts for his long and dogged defense of the church rate. From 1834 through 1837, during the first four years of the church rate conflict, Russell's stance appeared to be that of the Whig statesman. First in Earl Grey's administration and then in Lord Melbourne's, he attempted to reform the church rate system sufficiently to satisfy Dissenters that they could count on the Whig party as the party of reform.