This essay argues that the strict branch of the temperance movement helped create and spread an idea of a sober consumer culture in early Victorian Britain. It specifically examines the material and gustatory, political, and religious culture of the mass temperance tea parties that emerged in the 1830s and the 1840s. Supported by middle- and working-class followers, evangelicals, and liberals, the strict branch of the temperance movement insisted that the consumption of tea, sugar, and wheat-based baked goods in a heterosocial setting would demonstrate the rewards of a religious and sober life. Mass tea parties disciplined consumers through satisfying the body and encouraging pleasurable cross-class and mixed-gender interactions. Temperance advocates hoped that the behaviors and values inculcated at the tea table would radiate to the home, the factory, and the marketplace. The temperance movement thus contributed to the notion that drinking tea produced well-behaved and energetic workers, as well as rational consumers.

The emigration of women to South Africa and the other parts of the empire had been periodically promoted throughout the nineteenth century, but it was that great imperial crisis known as the Boer War which gave such emigration an immediate political and patriotic importance. The emigration of women, especially single women, was increasingly viewed not only as a means of assisting unfortunate, superfluous individuals but as a way of strengthening the empire—a matter of imperial urgency. By 1901 the issue of female emigration had become a part, and some argued the most important part, of the larger question of how to secure the South African colonies to the British Empire in more than name. An organized program for sending single women to South Africa was therefore jointly developed by the Colonial Office and the emigration societies which had long been interested in this work. This alliance between the hard-nosed bureaucrats of Downing Street and the amateurish gentlewomen who ran such organizations as the British Women's Emigration Association seldom, as events proved, operated smoothly, contributing in part to its limited success. This attempt to stimulate the settlement of women in South Africa is important, however, in illustrating the national mood in the aftermath of the victory in South Africa, the increased involvements of women in imperial affairs, and the difficulties facing the advocates of female emigration.

The origins of Joseph Chamberlain's, and hence the Colonial Office's, interest in female emigration is difficult to pinpoint. The preliminary report of 1900 of the Lands Settlement Commission chaired by H.O. Arnold-Forster drew the attention of the office to the demographic weakness of the British position in South Africa.

Dogberry: This is your charge: you shall comprehend all vagrom men; you are to bid any man stand, in the prince's name.

Watch: How if a' will not stand?

Dogberry: Why, then take no note of him, but let him go; and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave.

(Much Ado About Nothing, Act III, Scene iii)

Modern historians who have described the English village constable of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have largely accepted Shakespeare's Dogberry as an accurate portrayal of this official. They are almost unanimous in regarding the constable as an incompetent agent of royal authority, and like many of his seventeenth-century critics they depict him as uneducated, unprofessional, lazy, and disobedient. A recent study has also revealed that some of the men chosen as constable had “criminal” records. In one Essex village a number of these officials had previously been “in trouble with the courts,” sometimes having broken laws that it would be their duty to enforce when they became constables. Both historians and seventeenth-century commentators frequently attribute such failings to the social unsuitability of the men selected for the office. They claim that the substantial inhabitants of the village sought to avoid such a lowly position, and that it was thus filled by the “meaner sort” of residents who were attracted by its perquisites or were too poor to hire substitutes. Such men, it is contended, were not only ignorant and unable to spare time for their duties but also so lacking in social status that they were easily intimidated and commanded little respect.

Several studies of county government do suggest alternative approaches to understanding the constable's alleged incompetence. T.G. Barnes and A. Hassell Smith, for example, attribute the constable's weaknesses not only to the personal and social defects of the men selected for the position; they also suggest that divided allegiances often rendered such officials incapable of action.

When the Scots advanced on England in August 1640, reports of their formidable progress quickly reached London. Their march was

It would be hard to find a more vivid example of the integration of war and religion, of assent by military laymen to clerical authority, or of manipulation of ritual to impart a message: the presence of ministers and the Bible even more than the sobriety of the troops asserted that this army was the agent of God, to the comfort of its soldiers and the terror of its enemies.

Could England achieve comparable godliness, order, and confidence in execution of divine purpose in the conduct of its own war? Parliamentary clergy lived in hope of similar recognition and achievement. Yet at best ritual must be distinguished from accompanying practice, as the conduct of Scottish soldiers in Newcastle and its environs was to demonstrate; at worst the clerical message was derided and ignored.

By any measure, the National Insurance Act of 1911 ranks among the major legislative achievements of the Liberal administration that held office in Great Britain before World War I. One section of the act founded the world's first national system of compulsory unemployment insurance. Another section brought government-sponsored health insurance to five sixths of the families of the nation and established the precedent of state concern for the physical welfare of the individual citizen, of which the National Health Service Act of 1946 would be only an extension. By requiring beneficiary contributions toward welfare programs, the act settled the financial pattern for most of Britain's present social legislation. In a less crowded period, the National Insurance Act would rank as an imposing parliamentary monument, comparable, for instance, to the Education Act of 1902. Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, it has been lost from sight. The measure is not mentioned in the standard biography either of Asquith or of Balfour. It earns one sentence in G. M. Trevelyan's History of England in the Nineteenth Century, where through successive editions and revisions it is called “the National Health Insurance Act of 1912.” R. C. K. Ensor's England, 1870-1914 gives it a couple of paragraphs.

This study is an examination of an important, perhaps crucial, aspect of the evolution of the health insurance section of the National Insurance Act that has remained unnoticed for half a century: the lobby activity of the British commercial insurance industry by which the companies modified health insurance proposals for their own benefit.

Emily Davies' reputation rests almost entirely on her role as founder of the first Cambridge college for women—so much so that her biographer, Lady Barbara Stephen, entitled her lengthy and scholarly work (still the standard life fifty years after its publication) Emily Davies and Girton College. In keeping with her focus on Emily Davies as an educational pioneer, Lady Stephen paid little heed to the blind alleys that Davies first entered and then retreated from during the 1860s—the abortive editorships of the Englishwoman's Journal and Victoria Review, not to mention her brief and vexing stint as secretary of the first women's suffrage organization established in Britain.

Emily Davies' involvement with the nascent women's suffrage movement was not long lived, and was terminated with such ruffled feelings that she remained aloof from the suffrage cause for most of the rest of her career. Yet it was largely between 1865 and 1867, the years during which she played a central role in founding and then leading the first women's suffrage society, that the institutional and ideological strengths and weaknesses that were to characterize the suffrage movement for the next thirty years were shaped.

Emily Davies' father, John Davies, was an Evangelical minister. In 1815, at the age of twenty, he had left his native Wales to attend Queens' College, Cambridge, which had become one of the focal points of the then burgeoning Evangelical movement. He subsequently became both clergyman and schoolmaster, living mostly in Chichester until 1840, and then at Gateshead (near Newcastle) for the next twenty-two years.

In 1974 Professor Marc Schwarz published a review article on the historical reputation of King James I, in which he pointed out that that reputation had considerably improved in recent years. The slobbering pedant, lazy, conceited, cowardly, alcoholic, spendthrift, fancying pretty young men and giving them far too much influence in court and council: the lineaments of this caricature, first drawn by that foul-mouthed discharged officeholder Anthony Weldon, have not altogether vanished. But as historians have examined various aspects of the king's reign, reread the sources un-blinkered by the biases and assumptions characteristic of the Victorians and perpetuated in this century, from their widely varying points of view, by the disciples of Gloriana and of Karl Marx, a different view of King James has begun to emerge. The new picture of the king is that of a seeker of the via media at home and of peace abroad, a man with acute political antennae whose style was anything but confrontational and whose success in achieving that via media, and in keeping the peace, was comparable to that of his much-admired predecessor. Typical of the converts is Professor J.P. Kenyon, who in 1958 adopted the traditional view of James in his collection of essays on the Stuart kings, but who twenty years later described him as “a strange medley of opposites: he was a fool in some sense, but in others a great man.”

Professor Schwarz's analysis of the recent literature dealt in some detail with four areas: the king's policy toward the church and especially toward the Puritans; foreign affairs; James's views of the constitution and his relations with parliament; and his rule in Scotland. On some other matters there had been no attempt to defend the king: his disastrous economic and fiscal policies, including the inflation of honors, and his predilection for favorites like Somerset and Buckingham. In a number of these areas the work of the past ten years has done nothing to alter Schwarz's verdicts. No significant new work on foreign policy has appeared save in connection with other matters, to be discussed below; the era awaits its R.B. Wernham. There has been no attempt to defend James's irresponsible attitude toward money, which was by far his worst failing as a king, and there is reason to suppose that his financial reputation is irredeemable. It might be pointed out, however, that the Jacobean age was a postwar era, a period of relaxation after the long period of domestic and foreign tension which began when Henry VIII decided to put aside his wife.

Several recent studies dealing with the English church during the Norman period add immeasurably to our understanding of the era, but nonetheless represent a lost opportunity to recreate the actual ecclesiastical milieu, an English church unsevered from its Norman counterpart. Institutional differences surely existed between the two churches, yet much is lost in treating them separately. Indeed, few historians would attempt to study the great eleventh and twelfth-century cathedrals and abbey churches in England detached from those in Normandy. It is therefore the purpose of this paper to examine the customs, ideas, and especially the individuals which the two churches shared.

A concerted effort to reexamine political institutions as they once functioned, rather than as a necessary condition for the states which they later became, has already begun. In 1976 John Le Patourel produced an impressive synthesis, The Norman Empire, and asserted that following the Norman Conquest, England and Normandy formed one dominion. It was united by a ruler who was at the same time King of the English and Duke of the Normans, and by a baronial class which had extensive holdings on both sides of the Channel. This supposedly came to an end in 1144 when Geoffrey of Anjou conquered Normandy. A recent review of the The Norman Empire, which like most reviews speaks of its sterling qualities, nevertheless points out that the sections dealing with the church are, “not given much space … (and) are probably the most derivative in the book.”

“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.

One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in his English Whiggism and the American Revolution (1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to the History of Parliament John Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.

In February of 1885 news was flashed to England from Egypt that General Gordon was dead, stabbed by an Arab spear as the hordes of the Mahdi were overrunning the city of Khartoum in the Sudan. Dead he certainly was and nothing could resurrect him, and yet he has survived in the pages of biography, in the comments of the press, and in the mythology of culture. His “after-life” reveals some interesting facts about the nature of hero-worship and the role heroes play in the ethos of a national people and their self-image.

Charles George Gordon was born in January, 1833, the second son of a military family. He was trained for the military, too, became a Royal Engineer, and fought in the Crimean War. He saw service in Turkey, and then was sent to China where he gained fame in the suppression of the Taiping rebellion against the Manchu Empire in 1864, earning the nickname of “Chinese Gordon” at home and a Companion of the Bath from a grateful English government. The next six years he spent in service at Gravesend, constructing defensive fortifications, and devoting much of his time to rehabilitative work with the poor street boys of the town. Another six years he spent in Equatorial Sudan in an unsuccessful struggle to eliminate the slave trade. A brief period as Secretary to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India, was followed by service in Mauritius, and fighting against the Basuto uprising in South Africa for the Cape Government. The penultimate year of his life he wandered in the Holy Land, and finally he answered the call to return to the Sudan, which was threatened by the revolt of Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi.

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.

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.

The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.

During 1661 and 1662 Scotland experienced one of the largest witch hunts in its history. Within the space of sixteen months no fewer than 660 persons were publicly accused of various acts of sorcery and diabolism. The hunt began to the east of Edinburgh in the villages and small burghs of Midlothian and East Lothian, where 206 individuals were named as witches between April and December 1661. The hunt did not remain restricted to that area, however, as the privy council busily issued commissions to local authorities throughout the country to try suspected witches. We do not know how many people were executed during the hunt, but the report of John Ray, the English naturalist, that 120 were believed to have been burned during his visit to Scotland suggests that the total number was substantial. It is true that some of the witches tried in the justiciary court (the central Scottish criminal court, also known as the justice court) were acquitted, and a number of those who were simply named as accomplices never actually came to trial. This should in no way, however, detract from the size and importance of the hunt. At no other time in Scottish history, with the possible exception of 1597, were so many people accused of witchcraft within such a brief period of time. Indeed, the hunt, which involved four times the number of persons accused of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, was comparable to the large witch hunts that occurred on the European continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.