“I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.” With these words, Dr. William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated precisely the crime he denied to the last. Palmer's twelveday trial in May 1856, among the most celebrated English murder cases of the century, had received massive press attention, and his execution was no less scrutinized. Scaffold speeches being traditional opportunities for achieving closure on a case (preferably, though not exclusively, by confession and repentance), press reports devoted a good deal of space to the concerted efforts made to convince Palmer to comply with these expectations: “From the time of his sentence to the very moment when he ascended the scaffold,” one correspondent observed, “Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.”

Interrogated to the last, Palmer offered instead of closure a riddle, neither directly denying his guilt nor ratifying the grounds upon which his conviction rested. In doing so he seemed to take aim at the most contentious part of the trial, namely, the scientific evidence that had attributed the death of John Parsons Cook to strychnine poisoning. By disavowing strychnine as the agent of Cook's death, he at once repudiated the prosecution's fundamental contention and left open the possibility that, although he had been justly condemned as a murderer, his conviction was based on fallacious medico-legal grounds.

Palmer's dying words became the subject of widespread concern.

It has often been observed that the agreement underlying British politics today extends beyond the constitution to issues of public policy. To the historic consensus on “the rules of the game” the British have added a stalemate on “the welfare state.” Common sense dictates that electoral demands have shaped the terms of political debate, so that the Conservatives, whose interests obviously are served by lower taxation and less government interference in the affairs of business, have had to bow to the pressures for collectivism built up during World War II and institutionalized by five years of rule under a Labour Government. By the same token the Labour Party has had to re-evaluate its policies of government direction and control of social and economic affairs in the face of decided satisfaction recently with the Conservative operation of the welfare machinery.

Sole emphasis on electioneering, however, can overlook simultaneous and related developments on the ideological plane. For the community this can be observed in the gradual acceptance of Keynesian economics. The fact that government action can achieve and maintain full employment helped broaden and define the area of effective policy for both parties in Britain. More important for our purposes here is the inherent collectivism of British Conservatism — its “Toryness” — which permitted its adaptation to modern welfare policy and helped build the framework for that policy in the in ter-war years. It is my contention that British Conservatism exhibits its doctrinal element through its Tory tradition and that it is this tradition of the organic society, paternalism and authority, that served to interpret the demands of Conservative interests. The Tory tradition helps explain not only the collectivist similarity of the two main parties, it also contributes to an understanding of the endurance of Conservatism.

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father was the center of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture.

It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.

In recent years Irish historians have begun to look more closely into the strategies and tactics of nineteenth-century nationalism, exposing some of the disunities and inconsistencies in a movement long considered monolithic by generations of patriots and ideologues. Although we may rightly claim to know a good deal more than our predecessors about the contours and contents of Irish nationalism, there are still a number of ambiguities and unknowns about its nature, not to mention its significance. Indeed, if K. T. Hoppen is to be believed, most historians have erred by concentrating on the nationalist campaigns of the O'Connellites, Fenians, and Parnellites while neglecting altogether the arena of local politics. Stressing the “deep and constant” importance of “the parish pump,” Hoppen insists that the Repeal and Home Rule agitations were simply “unusual superimpositions upon the deeply pervasive and enduring localist traditions of Irish political life.” Irish voters, then, especially those in the boroughs, lived by and for local issues, personalities, and parties, and many were willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder or the biggest spender.

Such a strong dose of historical revisionism may have its uses, but Hoppen's book, for all its massive documentation, verve, and erudition, does not provide any explanation for the huge outpouring of support given to O'Connell, Parnell, and other advocates of “national” as well as “nationalist” issues. Only an incisive and far-ranging study of political propaganda, ideology, and the mobilization of voters and nonvoters alike in nineteenth-century Ireland can hope to resolve this controversy over the priorities of local and national as well as nationalist issues.

“Patterns sanctified by great historiographic traditions,” wrote J. H. Hexter, “tend to become fixed. Frequently these patterns are neither logical nor coherent, but the sanction of use and wont behind them is so powerful that researchers tend to force new materials into the time-honored model.” This contention is nowhere more manifest than in the historiography of the Puritan Revolution, where studies of religious developments and struggles during the English Civil War indeed reveal a “time honored model” and tend to convey an almost univocal argument concerning the Independents and the rise of the idea of religious toleration. “As early as 1643,” wrote one expert on the issue of toleration, “when the English Parliament was obliged to ally with the Scots in the Solemn League and Covenant … the issue of toleration came to the fore.” Consequently, because “the Presbyterian Scots wished to impose their Calvinist order on England, against the opposition on the parliamentary side of a core of Independents led by Oliver Cromwell and Sir Henry Vane the Younger,” the Independents “became the leading opponents of Presbyterianism and supporters of a general toleration.”

In the early 1920s, a young British woman visiting India met the man she would subsequently marry. As the woman's daughter later revealed, she and her companions “were just sitting down to dinner when he came in through the door and one of the bearers came forward to take his gun and clean it, but my father would have none of that. He always cleaned his own gun before he did anything else. This impressed my mother.” If the narrative halted here, the contemporary reader might construe the story as yet another example of traditional gender dynamics. The love-struck young woman admiringly observes the male imperialist's competent, professional handling of his firearm, symbol both of his mastery over the colonized Indian landscape and its people and of his masculine sexual prowess. In this instance, however, the young woman was no passively adoring female quivering before this symbolic display of male power and sexuality. She herself, as her daughter revealed, had been “brought up with guns” and was a “crack shot.” Her admiration for the man who would become her husband stemmed not from feelings of awe or feminine inadequacy but rather from her cool assessment that here was someone who was her equal—and could be her partner—in hunting, shooting, and handling of firearms. Indeed as their daughter recalled, the successful marriage between these two gun aficionados was based in part on the wife's participation in her husband's hunting duties as an officer in the Indian Forest Service.

There is no uniform technique for the study of popular protest and ideology: different periods require different forms of analysis. Historians of the eighteenth-century crowd, for example, have to de-code the rituals, symbols, violence, and theatre of seemingly tumultuous collective behavior in order to infer the legitimizing aims and beliefs of the plebeians who were so rebellious in defense of custom. Students of Chartism, by contrast, have a less daunting task. They have merely to consult the movement's literature and propaganda, the very language of which, it is now argued, did not simply mediate but actually served to determine the nature and limitations of proletarian ideology in early nineteenth-century England. There is no need to de-code or decipher this public political language: it must be read as it was phrased, within the structural conventions and constraints of traditional oppositional discourse. Eschewing the orthodox social and economic interpretations of Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones has insisted that the movement's altogether political language was neither symbolic nor anachronistic. It was political monopoly, the Chartists proclaimed and believed, which led to polarization and immiseration; it was political power, therefore, secured by the venerable Six Points, which would facilitate economic and social amelioration. Phrased in the traditional radical idiom of political exclusion, the Chartist challenge acquired unprecedented conjunctural relevance and force in the 1830s as parliament and the state were reformed at the expense of the unrepresented. Regional rental variations notwithstanding, the uniform £10 franchise of the 1832 Reform Act left the working class alone as the excluded and unrepresented people, separated from the “shopocrats” who acquired the vote and joined the ranks of the politically privileged.

In this letter to her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu expresses what was in the early eighteenth century a commonplace view of wedlock. Marriage, she writes, is such an object of mockery that even women have lost interest in it and married women like herself must “excuse” themselves for their unfashionable behavior. Obviously, Lady Mary's tone is light, but she expresses ideas that were being argued quite seriously in a variety of circles. Many of her contemporaries believed that marriage was deteriorating into a business contract. Rather than being respected as an institution ordained by God and necessary to social stability, the argument went, marriage was an object of mockery, used only as a cynical means of increasing wealth. Brides were being bought and sold with no regard for their future happiness or compatibility with their husbands. Most famously, perhaps, this notion was exploited in William Hogarth's series, Marriage à la Mode (1745), its very title embodying the idea that mercenary marriage was a new fashion.

The use of anthropological methods and models to inform the conceptualization of social history is no longer a novelty by any means. Whereas the historian has long documented and interpreted the events and sometimes the material objects of past times, and placed them in causal relationships, in recent years anthropologists have helped historians to unveil the multiplicity of meaning in a particular sets of events or material objects. Common and effective applications of such collaboration have been made with regard to such concerns as kinship and marriage, the nature of personal honor, hospitality, and the ritualized expression of group identity. Yet historians have also employed an anthropological approach to the ritualistic or semiotic aspects of whole communities.

Of the countless addresses which assailed English eardrums in the nineteenth century, few are more widely remembered in the general histories of Britain and the British Empire than Benjamin Disraeli's celebrated speech at the Crystal Palace on June 24, 1872. There he made a profession of faith in the Empire which is still often said to have marked his conversion from the apathy of an earlier day when he had described the colonies as “a millstone round our necks.” The speech, moreover, is commonly regarded as the great signpost at the start of the highway to the “New Imperialism,” and it is usually credited with having furnished the Tories a popular banner which they subsequently carried into the political arena with outstanding success. The speech has been both praised as “the famous declaration from which the modern conception of the British Empire takes its rise” and condemned as an opportunistic effort to “dish the Whigs,” but friend and foe alike have accorded it a significance which it does not wholly deserve.

For many decades historians have harked back to the middle years of the last century as the heyday of anti-imperialism in Britain. This was the period of “Little England,” when many of her leaders — especially the men of the Manchester School — looked with favor on the main doctrine of separatism: cut the colonies loose and let them set up shop for themselves so as to end the financial burdens borne by the mother country. The climax of this movement was supposed to have occurred about 1870, when a sudden imperialist tide swept away all separatist notions.

On June 16, in the midst of the disturbances at Cambridge during the Rising of 1381, a woman named Margery Starre was said to have tossed the ashes of burnt documents to the winds, crying as she did so, “away with the learning of clerks! away with it!” The story of this woman's violence against texts is not unknown—it has been noted several times in major studies of the revolt—but its significance as part of the much larger story of women in 1381 has been overlooked.

Instances of women's participation appear in the judicial records, chronicles, and poetry produced in the decade following the revolt. These texts depict women as independent leaders and maintainers of rebel bands, as instigators of others' violence, and as accomplices with their family members in criminal acts. They also “participated” as victims: women were assaulted, abducted, and threatened with death, and their property was frequently stolen or destroyed. Despite the evidence, and despite the recent and widespread interest of medievalists in both social history and feminist studies, women's roles in the revolt have gone largely unexamined. In this initial sense, the women constitute an imaginary component of their society: overlooked and ignored by the scholarship, their presence in 1381 is assumed to be unreal. From the absence of study comes the absence of women in history.

But we should not be so surprised to “discover” women in 1381, since earlier and later medieval collective actions feature women either in active roles or functioning as symbols of insurrection.

The several statutes passed between 1534 and 1544 devoted to the rebuilding of decayed urban housing, collectively known as the Rebuilding Statutes, have been drawn upon in at least two scholarly debates about English government and economic life in the sixteenth century. First, in his discussion of Thomas Cromwell and the Henrician government's efforts to respond to economic and social problems, Professor (now Sir) Geoffrey Elton identified these statutes as important examples of central government initiative. Elton traced the inception of these acts to complaints about the state of housing brought by individuals at court and by the M.P.s of several individual towns. He saw the legislation itself as an example of the central government empowering individual towns to attend to the economic reality of decayed houses in their midst, and found it “an interesting precedent for local and private acts procedures (sic) of later days.” For Elton, then, the Rebuilding Statutes offered evidence of central government initiative in setting economic policy, a view intended to support his more general thesis about the primacy of the 1530s as a “revolutionary” point in the development English governing institutions. The same observation may be taken in support of Elton's later concept that Parliament, along with other central institutions, formed a “point of contact” with such particular and local interests as the towns listed in these statutes.

This article re-examines existing narratives of British permissiveness and secularization through a discussion of the Church of England's role in shaping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and ongoing debates on homosexuality in the 1970s. It suggests—contrary to existing narratives of religious decline and marginalization—that the views of church commentators, and the opinions of the Established Church more generally, remained of real cultural and political influence in the years leading up to the 1967 Act. Religious authorities were thus more responsible for the moral landscape of the permissive society than historians previously assumed. Nevertheless, British permissiveness was full of contradictions, not only in terms of the unexpected ways in which reform was shaped and brought about, but in terms of the constraints of the new moral settlement which decriminalized homosexual behavior within modest boundaries. Such contradictions were not confined to the opinions of religious commentators—they were the genuine essence of the position on which the moral consensus in favor of homosexual law reform was based. Through a consideration of the final collapse of this moral consensus in the years after 1970, this article reassesses questions of the nature and timing of British secularization. It considers how the Church of England, although anticipating and shaping earlier developments in approaches toward sexual morality, unintentionally left itself out in the cold in the years after 1970, as progressive opinion began to move away from the consensus on which the 1967 Act had been based.

This article examines the nature of petitioning to the Westminster Parliament from the beginnings of the “rage of party” to the establishment of the whig oligarchy. It uses the largely unused archive of the House of Lords, which survived the parliamentary fire in 1834, to provide systematic evidence of public subscription to petitions produced in response to legislation. A total of 330 “large responsive petitions,” signed by fifty-six thousand people, were presented to the Lords between 1688 and 1720. This enabled a wide range of social and geographical groups to lobby Parliament. Parliamentarians actively sought to direct the public into voicing opinion through petitioning on matters of policy. The intervention of the language of “interest” from the mid-seventeenth century helped to legitimize and control public involvement in politics in the eyes of elites, and offered an alternative to political mobilization based on party allegiances and conceptions of society organized by ranks or sorts. The participation of the public through a regulated process of petitioning ensured that the whig oligarchy was porous and open to negotiation, despite the passage of the Septennial Act and declining party and electoral strife after 1716.

The enactment into law in January 1916 of the first installment of mandatory military service in modern British history was an event whose importance few scholars dispute. While invariably considered a significant break in the British political and military tradition, recent scholarship has tended to treat the passage of the first Military Service Act as an episode that has little new to tell us about the political rivalry within the coalition cabinet presided over by Herbert Henry Asquith since May 1915. No student of the compulsory service debate can deny that he has been warned off, as Lord Beaverbrook wrote in the late 1920s that close study of the politics of conscription in the Asquith coalition would be “tedious to the last degree.” Most forbidding was the judgment of Lord Blake in his life of the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law: “The question of conscription would indeed be a tedious topic to pursue through all its ramifications. The endless discussions, the attitudes taken by public men at various times, the compromises, the disputes, constitute a chapter in English history to which, no doubt in years to come dull history professors will direct their duller research students.”

Many historians of the world war who have found the subject less dull than implied above have concluded that it presents a straightforward story: the implementation of conscription came about because the traditional policy of voluntarism had proven insufficient to raise an army of adequate size. The episode has been judged essentially a triumph of the Tory right wing (with the collusion of the maverick Liberal David Lloyd George) over orthodox Liberalism.

It is a commonplace of Tudor history that one distinctive feature of the reign of Elizabeth Tudor was the panache with which she wooed her English subjects. Such activity has been treated much more as an aspect of her “instinct for romantic leadership,” much less as a subject for serious historical study. This article sets out to redress that dismissive stance and argues that the language and processes of her “wooing” encapsulated an intersection of humanist beliefs and Tudor policy, with serious political purposes and significant political implications. Since the 1960s, a new orthodoxy in the study of political thought has stressed the importance of paying attention to the audiences for whom, and the contexts within which, particular political ideas were expressed, but there has been little effect of this trend on Tudor political studies. Historians have paid only passing attention to whole new genres of Tudor political discourse, let alone to the increasing Tudor range of strategies for presenting fundamental political propositions to an ever-widening audience. The introduction of print, the polemical function of Tudor homilies, Tudor royal proclamations, and court-sponsored political pamphlets all carried important messages. Such evolving forms contained within them implied redefinitions of relationships between subject and monarch. The reign of Henry VIII reflected the evolution of a qualitatively new concept of the sovereign monarch, drawing on an increasingly unqualified doctrine of allegiance.