It is a truism that the most distinctive features of the peculiarly English genius in politics are moderation and compromise. The sources of this spirit must be sought throughout the whole fabric of English history, but it should be easier to examine some of the stages by which it emerged onto the conscious level of political thought. How long have Englishmen spoken of political moderation as a good in itself? Herbert Butterfield awards to the Whigs the honor of contributing to modern British history their instinct for compromise. Locke has often been thought of as doing the same. But Toryism has come in for its share of the credit, and a student of John Dryden's thought has suggested that the Tory Dryden well illustrates the tradition of avoiding political extremes and reconciling liberty and authority. This is a fruitful suggestion, and it may be carried further by seeking evidence of this tradition in the predecessors of the Tories, the royalists of the Civil War period. These latter, far from being diehards or extremists, were the advocates of a political mean, and tried to defend at once the king's authority and the subject's liberty. In some degree, this is now widely conceded, but the significance of this moderation is not as clear as it ought to be, because its nature is not understood. When it is understood, it will be possible to say that the most important characteristic of seventeenth-century English royalism was not its defense of the king, but its defense of political moderation and limited government.

Who indeed can say, in answer to Sir Thomas Browne's searching question, “whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable men forgot”? Even though the making of books promises to leave no person “forgot,” the question still abides. More than that, it accents a paradox: under the spell of behavioral science the historian wrestles with vast impersonal forces and reduces personalities to a footnote, yet biography flourishes as never before. Whether the harvest reflects academic search for topics, popular interest, or plain conviction that first and last history is about people, their thoughts, their deeds, and their influence, or, for that matter, all three, some aspiring Ph.D. may decide. Here it is enough to consider another facet of Sir Thomas's inquiry. Puzzling in itself, that question becomes even more troubling when the historian is confronted with a man whose legacy does not put him in the calendar of great men, yet whose career warrants far more attention than that given to paltry politicians, incompetent generals, and notorious whores, and indeed may take precedence over that of more highly rated contemporaries in probing the intellectual milieu. James Anderson is such a man.

The notice of his death on October 15, 1808, means little except to the initiate: “At Westham, Essex, James Anderson, LL.D of Mounie in the county of Aberdeen. He was the author of several works on Agriculture, Political Economy, and other subjects of general interest.” So concise a notice scarcely did justice to its subject, and before long magazines repaired the defect, one adding a “faithful portrait of the learned and ingenious Dr. Anderson.”

In December 1832 and January 1833 the British reoccupied the Falkland Islands or the Malvinas. This reassertion of British sovereignty began an uninterrupted period of control that lasted until 2 April 1982, when armed forces of the Republic of Argentina forced the surrender of the British governor and garrison at Stanley, the capital of what the British had come to call “The Falkland Islands Dependency.” The Argentine occupation ended with a surrender to British arms on 14 June 1982. These celebrated events of recent times brought forth a fundamental question, here addressed: Why did the British possess the islands in the first place? The British government's motivation for reoccupying the Falklands in 1832–33 is insufficiently explained in existing historical literature, though the legal intricacies are known. Julius Goebel the Younger, a student of international law, termed the contest for sovereignty of the islands a “struggle.” However, his work, a study in international legal history, was not based on strategic, maritime, and economic considerations and, moreover, did not probe the question of British motivation in reoccupation. V. F. Boyson's history of the islands is a valuable survey but it inadequately investigates the same theme and the precise period under consideration. Other histories of the Falklands written in English do not examine the matter of motivation in depth. Argentine sources are extensive and see the British reoccupation as illegal. They tend at the same time to recite the arguments for sovereignty over the Malvinas; and one Argentine historian has called the reoccupation “the third English invasion,” in reference to two previous occupations by the British in 1765 and 1771. The following inquiry seeks to rectify these matters and is based on British documents, particularly in-letters of Commanders-in-Chief on the South American station. These reports to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty reveal two concerns: firstly, the infringement by Argentine and American traders and marine exploiters in territory and territorial waters traditionally claimed but not effectively occupied by the United Kingdom and, secondly, the importance of the Falklands as a base from which to safeguard the sea routes of the southern oceans.

The resurgence of oligarchies in England's provincial towns during the fifteenth century and their firm control over almost all aspects of civic life during the sixteenth century has received considerable attention and is apparently beyond dispute. The characteristic feature of this oligarchical control was the domination of the important civic offices by urban dynasties whose members practiced the most influential and lucrative trades, were the most affluent citizens, and were linked by close family ties. Comparatively few studies have been made of officeholders of the seventeenth century, especially for the period after 1660, yet the evidence so far accumulated suggests that officeholding remained the exclusive privilege of a closed social elite. Nevertheless, Norwich may provide an instructive exception. An examination of the pool of men eligible for political office in Norwich, the largest provincial capital, indicates that the door to political office was open to men of diverse social backgrounds and occupations to a greater extent than during the sixteenth century and apparently much more so than in the other large provincial capitals.

Oligarchy may be defined as the possession and exercise of power by a few individuals either directly, as a consequence of holding the important political offices, or indirectly, as a consequence of controlling recruitment of officeholders and influencing their decisions. In the former case, which was the general pattern establishsed in those fifteenth and sixteenth-century towns which remained free from the intervention of territorial magnates, oligarchy implies further that the magistrates have either the exclusive privilege of appointing their own replacements or the ability to manipulate the mechanism of political recruitment involving a wider electorate through control of the processes of nomination and election of officeholders.

Students of British history continue to experience a certain haziness as to what precisely differentiated the Liberals and Conservatives of the mid-Victorian era, a haziness by no means allayed by the plethora of recent publications on the social and organizational structure of the nineteenth-century political party system. In 1832 political reform had constituted an apparently decisive issue—at least Grey and Russell had strongly favored it and Peel and Wellington had forthrightly opposed it. In the mid-1840s the Corn Laws had supplied a comparable cause for division. The Whigs and Radicals had provided Peel with his majority, and two-thirds of the Tories had disavowed their leader and resisted the abolition of the Corn Laws to the last.

Yet neither of these issues would seem to provide a key to the party rivalry of the 1860s. The manner in which Disraeli played the role of political magician in 1867 and pulled the Reform Act of that year out of his hat provides prima facie evidence that political reform as such was not then fundamental to inter-party rivalry. Nor was agricultural protection, the plank that Derby and Disraeli had quietly removed from their party platform a decade-and-a-half earlier. The cause of Italian unification, which had briefly divided parties in 1859 and had spurred Gladstone to cast his political lot once and for all with Palmerston and Russell, had become a fact and was no longer an issue.

The guiding policy of James I, as King of England and the acknowledged leader of Protestant Europe, had been since his accession one of rapprochement with the great Catholic powers. To this end he had determined to marry his son and heir, Prince Charles, first to a Bourbon, and then a Hapsburg princess. James saw himself not as the leader of a bloc, but as a mediator impartial in the interests of peace. To his mind this was the most exalted function of Christian kingship, and it was his hope that Spain and England, the leaders of Christendom's two camps of faith, could preserve the peace of Europe by acting in concert.

Yet James was no dreamer. While courting Spain, he retained hegemony among his fellow Protestants. If he proposed to marry Charles to a Catholic, he had matched his daughter Elizabeth to a Calvinist, the Elector Palatine Frederick V. The latter alliance, however, was to prove to be his fatal mistake, for it sucked him inextricably into the maelstrom of German politics and precipitated not only the gravest foreign crisis of his reign, but a domestic one of ultimately far greater significance as well.

Frederick was the leader of the most important alliance of Protestant powers in Germany, the Evangelical Union. He was also one of the seven electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. Three of these were Catholic bishops, three secular Protestants, and the last, the King of Bohemia, had for a hundred years been the emperor-designate himself, to wit, the senior male representative of the House of Hapsburg. It was evident, therefore, that any disturbance in the orderly succession to the Bohemian crown would immediately jeopardize the traditional Hapsburg claim to the imperium, and with it the entire European balance of power.

Those non-medievalists who had the opportunity to see the film The Lion in Winter may well have concluded that the intensity and extent of hostility among the members of King Henry II's family had been exaggerated for dramatic effect. It would appear, however, that the rivalries between Henry and his sons, and of the latter among themselves, provide a noteworthy example of an historical reality that was even more virulent than the fictionalized version. For example, in 1173-1174, Henry's sons, Henry the Younger, Richard, and Geoffrey, revolted against their father despite the fact that they were only teenagers at the time. The youths were joined in this effort by their mother, Eleanor. However, she was captured by Henry II, who imprisoned her until his own death sixteen years later. In 1182, Henry the Younger again threatened to revolt against his father. The next year found the youth at war with his brother Richard. This conflict widened when Geoffrey joined his brother against Richard, who subsequently was supported by the king. During this campaign Henry the Younger and Geoffrey appear to have attempted to have their father killed. In 1184, following Henry the Younger's death, Geoffrey and his youngest brother, John, went to war against Richard. Finally, in 1189, King Henry died while at war against Richard, who was supported by John.

Henry's family problems were not limited to hostilities with his sons, for on two earlier occasions, in 1152 and 1156, he went to war against his own brother Geoffrey. In a similar vein, Henry's sons did not only find themselves in conflict with their father but, as noted above, they fought against each other. This did not end with Henry's death: John and Richard were in conflict with each other on several occasions, and the former certainly was responsible for the murder of his nephew Arthur.

In 1210, King John led to Ireland an army that consisted of the feudal levy of England, mercenary knights from Flanders, and a large force of Serjeants and crossbowmen, supported in the course of the campaign by some seven hundred ships. Money paid out for the ships totalled over £3,800, while wages for the crossbowmen and Serjeants topped £2,380. The 1210 Irish expedition was an impressive operation and showed Angevin government at its most effective. Modern historians, needless to say, have been impressed by the organisation and scale of the undertaking. What makes John’s Irish campaign not only impressive but terrifying was that, in one sense, it was all done to hunt down one man and his family.

No event of the post-Second World War decade in Britain is recalled as affectionately or enveloped in such an aura of nostalgia as the Festival of Britain, a five-month series of cultural events and exhibits, with its centerpiece at the South Bank in London. But the Festival dear to the recollections of those growing up during and after the war diverged sharply from the original conception of its progenitors.

In 1943 the Royal Society of the Arts, partly responsible for the Great Exhibition of 1851, suggested to the government that an international exhibition along similar lines be staged in 1951 to commemorate the earlier event. To propose a celebratory occasion in 1943 was an act of faith that the war would not only end successfully, but that Britain would have recovered sufficiently by 1951 to warrant such a demonstration. In September 1945, with the war over and Labour in power, Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, addressed an open letter to Stafford Cripps, then President of the Board of Trade, advocating a trade and cultural exhibition in London as a way of commemorating the centenary of the Crystal Palace. Such an exhibition would advertise British products and display British prowess in design and craftsmanship. He favored a site in the center of London, such as Hyde Park or Battersea, either of which would provide ample space for such an exhibition. What prompted these suggestions was the need to provide practical help to British commerce at a time when it was clearly under pressure shifting from wartime controls to peacetime competition.

It is difficult to generalize about how people at any point in time view the process of growing old and the aged themselves. Attitudes towards old people have perhaps always been ambiguous and are probably ambiguous in western societies today. In seventeenth-century England, which in so many ways combined tradition and modernity, the ambivalent attitude towards the elderly included both traditional and modern aspects in three ways. First, as with traditional societies, early modern Englishmen looked upon old age as simply another stage in life, one of the seven through which all persons must pass; at the same time, old age was seen as something entirely different, a reversal of all previous stages. The latter view, which sociologists have labeled the “implicit” view, sees life as a constant process of expansion and growth until one reaches old age when the process is halted and reversed. Secondly, as in other traditional societies, old age was seen as a period of great dignity and wisdom, with the elderly deserving the respect and admiration of all other persons. Alongside this view in seventeenth-century England, old age was thought of as a time of folly and old people were described in undesirable terms. Thirdly, there were two ways of looking at death and its nearness: the traditional Christian view, held by many seventeenth-century theologians, was that death was entirely in God's hands and was a relief from the suffering of earthly life. The more modern view, held by others in the seventeenth-century, was that death was postponable by sensible precautions or by the science of medicine. Drawing on the literature of the age, this article will attempt to show old age in all of these various ways and point out the ambiguities.

The most important contribution made by Archbishop James Ussher to the ecclesiastical developments of the Interregnum and Restoration periods was his short tract The Reduction of Episcopacy Unto the Form of Synodical Government. Printed only after his death in 1656, its combination of ministerial synods with episcopal rule was seen as a basis for presbyterian-episcopal reconciliation over the next three decades. The tract was printed in five editions during the later 1650s, and came out in two more editions in 1679, when the Popish Plot and the calling of a new Parliament revived hopes that dissenters could be comprehended within the Church of England. It was printed once more in 1689, in Edinburgh, when “comprehension” was again being hotly debated in both England and Scotland. By that time Ussher's name had come to symbolize such “limited” or “primitive” episcopacy, and indeed it has continued to do so among twentieth-century historians.

The fame of the Reduction rests upon its content and authorship. Although the tract was only one of many such compromises offered during the Interregnum, it was the most radical to come from the royalist and Anglican side during that period. Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Ussher was admired and respected by radical puritans and major Laudian spokesmen such as Henry Hammond and Bishop John Bramhall. The power of Ussher's name in this context was shown in 1685, when the nonconformist divine and politician Richard Baxter was on trial for allegedly making a printed attack against the king and the bishops. When Baxter's attorney, Sir Henry Pollexfen, sought to introduce as evidence one of Baxter's own printed compromises between episcopal and presbyterian government, Lord Chief Justice George Jeffreys replied, “I will see none of his books; it is for primitive Episcopacy, I will warrant you — a bishop in every parish.” In replying “Nay, my lord, it is the same with Archbishop Usher's,” Pollexfen indicated both the radical nature of the Reduction and the legitimacy that Ussher's name lent to other compromises of this kind.

For years those who have looked for the contribution of religion to the “spirit of capitalism” have concentrated on the English Puritans and their Calvinist counterparts elsewhere. Those scholars have relied on literary evidence to make their points, and to establish the relationship between Calvinist doctrines or assumptions and an ascetic and compulsive devotion to work. It came as a surprise, therefore, when a rigorously quantitative content analysis of the most popular religious books of Restoration England showed just the opposite—that the most self-consciously “Anglican” authors were those who placed the most emphasis upon work and worldly enterprise as a religious duty. They were also able to integrate this duty with the rest of their theology in a more straightforward, logical manner than the Puritans, for whom the connection is thought to have been psychological, mediated by religious anxiety. Work was, for the most popular Anglican authors, part of a moralistic religion of works. We can even say that such an emphasis was adopted at just the time when Anglicans were facing up to a change in the status of their church and adopting attitudes more characteristic of members of a movement or denomination, which helps to explain why work and effort were coming to seem more important to them.

There have been numerous lines of criticism of Max Weber's thesis connecting the doctrine of evangelical conversion and the spirit of economic enterprise. But since the following approach and alternative suggestions do not build on them, we must go back again to Weber's own classic formulation.

Students of the industrial revolution now generally admit what seemed obvious to Samuel Garbett, the Birmingham manufacturer and lobbyist, two hundred years ago; namely, that the state was an important participant in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Many scholars still emphasize the restraint of English government — a restraint which gave relatively free play to natural economic forces and to individual genius, a restraint which also aggravated the social repercussions of so momentous a transformation. But they recognize that entrepreneurs could obtain legal sanction for enclosures, canals, and a myriad of other “improvements' easily and at moderate cost by means of a private act of parliament, and they debate whether existing patent law stimulated invention by providing adequate rewards for the inventor or aimed primarily at discouraging stultifying monopoly. Because the processes of growth in the last decades of the century were so fundamental and pervasive, fiscal, commercial, colonial, and foreign policies were bound to have an impact on the embryonic industrial economy. Whether government by its various acts encouraged or impeded growth is open to debate at a number of levels. There can be no doubt, however, that politicians endeavored, if sometimes slowly and haphazardly, to adapt policy and law to changing conditions and that their decisions did affect the tempo and quality of growth.

The conventional wisdom of English urban history holds that town government in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coming increasingly under the domination of a tight, resurgent oligarchy. This view was embalmed by Jacob in his volume of the Oxford History of England, and is reproduced in the newest works on medieval and early-modern towns. Clearly, the doubts voiced at length by Mrs. Green in the late nineteenth century and developed quite vigorously by Bridbury in 1962 have found no echo, and the doctrine is now, in the words of one historian, “apparently beyond dispute.”

Yet, in spite of such remarkable unanimity, any student of urban history in this period must feel some unease due to the slender empirical basis upon which this view has been predicated. Monographs on late-medieval and early-modern English towns are few, and specialized studies of town government are equally rare. Indeed, Hoskins has recently identified “the personnel of the governing class” as “one important and almost unfilled field of urban study.” Thus, an extended examination of the structures and personnel of a late-medieval and early-modern urban “oligarchy” needs little justification because of its potential substantive and methodological implications for the constitutional, political, and social history of the English town.

The following study attempts to do this for Oxford, a middling urban center at this time, which, according to Mrs. Lobel, shared in the heightened oligarchy of the age. It is neither a proper study in constitutional history nor a narrative of local politics or governmental activities. Rather, it focuses upon the changing structures and personnel of the town in order to shed some new light on the problems raised above.

Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically in The Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.

Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. In Becoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”

Ireland in the eighteen-fifties was quiescent through exhaustion. The great famine of the eighteen-forties had resulted in heavy population losses through death and emigration and demoralized tenant farmers had offered but a feeble resistance to wholesale evictions. The failure of the Irish Confederate risings of 1848-49, the collapse of tenant-right agitation and the disintegration of the Independent Irish Party at Westminster, had left the country sunk in political apathy. The trade union movement did not escape the general paralysis and the Regular Trades Association, a central organization that had developed in Dublin during the eighteen-forties, disappeared. Not until 1859 was there renewed trade union activity in the form of a campaign to abolish night-baking; though it had only limited success, it helped to bring about the appearance in 1863 of a new grouping of Dublin trade unions, the United Trades Association. It was, however, not a trade union organization but the Irish Republican Brotherhood that aroused the country from political torpor.

The I.R.B., known in North America as the Fenian Brotherhood, was a secret oath-bound society pledged to establish an independent Irish republic. Its first leader was James Stephens, who had founded it in 1858 after his return from an exile following the 1848 rising. Its membership was drawn from the rural and urban working class – the sons of small farmers, mechanics, artisans, laborers and petty shopkeepers. In 1861 Stephens skillfully stage-managed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, a Confederate exile whose body was brought back for burial in Ireland, and thus aroused an unprecedented interest in “The Organization,” as its members called it.

Serious study of the origins of the jury began in the time of William Stubbs and F. W. Maitland, when the work of the German historical school of jurisprudence reached England. Until then knowledge of the medieval English jury before the time of Henry II had been more legendary than real. William Blackstone had traced the common law to a compilation that King Alfred supposedly commanded to be made. Blackstone had written in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, “Some authors have endeavoured to trace the original of juries up as high as the Britons themselves, the first inhabitants of our island; but certain it is that they were in use among the earliest Saxon colonies.”

In the mid-nineteenth century the Anglo-Saxon origin of the jury was still a popular legend in England, but the German school of legal history sought a more scientific study of the problem. A representative of that group, Heinrich Brunner, in his book, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, rejected the traditional teaching that the jury was Germanic and popular in origin. Instead, he believed it to be royal in origin, an authoritarian means of gathering information, particularly information of a financial nature. It first appeared as the inquest of the Frankish kings, inherited from the imperial Roman fisc. It passed from them to the Norman dukes and then was introduced to England with William. According to Brunner the Norman kings reserved this fact-finding technique for themselves, extending it to their subjects in only a few cases.