Lord Acton, one of the most formidable intellects of the last century, was a master of transforming seemingly complicated or contradictory principles into concise epigrammatic statements. Attempting to reconcile Edmund Burke's many liberal views with his reputed Conservatism, Acton asked why was Burke “not an entire liberal? How thoroughly he wished for liberty—of conscience—property, trade, slavery, etc. What stood against it? His notion of history. The claims of the past. The authority of time. The will of the dead. Continuity.” One of the most important lessons to be derived from Burke's writings—recognized by countless authorities as the wellspring of modern British Conservatism—is that Conservatism is not so much a system of thought or ideology as it is a general inclination and regard for history. The behavior of the Conservative Party has been governed by precedent and pragmatism rather than by rationalism and idealism. Words such as dogma, program, or even policy have never been part of its lexicon, whereas such words as spirit, tradition, or even “way“ have more aptly described its approach to politics.

By the twentieth century the Conservative Party's preference for lessons from the past (in accordance with England's common law tradition) to any scientifically derived formulas had gained for it the twin monikers of “the national party” and “the stupid party.” But Conservatism does not claim to possess the “keys or the Kingdom,” notes Ian Gilmour, an active politician and Conservative theoretician. “There is no certainty about the route and no certainty about the destination. As Burke said of himself, the lead has to be heaved every inch of the way.” Such is the way that modern British Conservatives, at least, have wished to perceive themselves.

Recent studies of the social history of birth control in America have noted the importance of eugenics in securing the acceptance of family planning between the two world wars. Similarly in England the endorsement of contraception as a method of “race improvement” by eugenists in the scientific, medical, academic and ecclesiastical communities greatly enhanced the credence and respectability of the birth control movement. In the anti-racist, genetically more sophisticated climate since the Second World War it is often forgotten how pervasive eugenic assumptions about human inheritance were in learned and socially elevated circles in the early twentieth century. Belief in the inheritability of myriad physical, psychological and behavioral characteristics, identifiable, even quantifiable, in particular ethnic groups and social classes was reinforced by expert scientific testimony, and, perhaps equally important, middle and upper class prejudices.

Birth control leaders, whose respectability was always in some doubt, were for the most part no exception and readily mingled with the estimable worthies who adorned the ranks of the elitist Eugenics Education Society founded in 1907. Several officers of the old Malthusian League, including its last president, Charles Vickery Drysdale, and his wife, Bessie, were early if troublesome recruits to the Society, while Marie Stopes, the most dynamic promoter of birth control in England in the inter-war years, joined in 1912, and eventually became a Life Fellow who left the organization a financial legacy, her famous clinic and much of her library, upon her death in 1958.

In an October 1861 letter to Charles Sumner, the prominent Republican Senator from Massachusetts, William Howard Russell, The Times’ correspondent in America, explained England’s attitude toward the American Civil War: “In England we are threatened with Americanization which to our islands would be anarchy & ruin, & the troubles in America afford our politicians & writers easy means of dealing deadly blows at Brightism which is often attacked under the guise of war & the troubles in America.” Indeed, as Russell claimed, the conflict allowed those who identified the radicalism of John Bright with Americanization and disorder to present a plausible case to the English public. Americans, so this argument went, were but Englishmen transformed by Americanization, a social and political process that fostered a licentious individualism and a pernicious egalitarianism. This transformation had not only precipitated disorder in America, but the deterioration of civilization. England could also succumb to Americanization if it allowed Brightism to achieve dominance by extending the suffrage and introducing a radical, middle-class Parliament. The consequent implementation of free trade and destruction of privilege would lead to political and social democracy, making Americans of the English in England. From this perspective, Bright was an American in the most pejorative sense of the word.

We are apt to associate Puritanism, quite reasonably, with evangelical preaching, and to talk about the Puritan movement as the tail end of the English Reformation, as the last attempt to take Biblical Christianity into every parish pulpit and hence into the hearts of God's “Elect Nation.” As a consequence, it has seemed both proper and illuminating to view the history of Elizabethan Puritanism as a series of confrontations between Puritan ministers and the Queen's bishops, the bishops attempting to create unity by imposing uniformity of practice, the Puritan ministers attempting to follow what they believed Scripture and the example of the best reformed Churches dictated, with the inevitable consequence that they found themselves engaged in a kind of perpetual guerrilla war with the Queen's guardians of a prescribed uniform order.

If such basic assumptions are accepted, then the history of Elizabethan Puritanism can be seen as a series of escalating encounters, beginning in 1564, when the Queen forced the issue of discipline and order on a reluctant Church by requiring that Archbishop Parker publish his Advertisements. The debating stage was over in the Spring of 1566, when Parker and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners summoned the defiant London clergy to conform to the prescribed clerical dress or face expulsion for refusing to wear what Robert Crowley called “the conjuring garments of popery.” The year 1570 saw an escalation of the controversy. Cartwright's lectures on the nature of the true church mounted a much more substantial attack than had been seen in the first decade of the reign, for it was one thing to attack the surplice as a popish garment, quite another to argue that episcopacy itself lacked a Scriptural basis and that by implication it was, therefore, the Queen's duty to impose “discipline out of the Word”—a Presbyterian order—on the Church of England. In 1572 two Londoners, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, tried to give political reality to these notions in their Admonition to the Parliament.

The history of British continuing education has been written almost entirely as institutional history. The impact of the 1924 Board of Education regulations on the funding of adult classes has been thoroughly examined, and we know a good deal about the various district secretaries of the Workers' Educational Association. But we have yet to tackle a set of more fundamental and revealing questions about the WEA: Who were the students? Why did they enroll in WEA courses? What were their intellectual goals? What cultural equipment did they bring to their classes? What went on inside the classroom? Most importantly, how, if at all, did the WEA change the lives and minds of its students?

This article focuses on a controversy that erupted shortly after the WEA was launched in 1903, and which persists today: a question that can only be resolved by studying WEA students at close range. According to a number of Marxist critics, the WEA played an important role in steering the British working class away from Marxism. Roger Fieldhouse argues that the WEA'S emphasis on objective scholarship and open-mindedness “could have the effect of neutralising some students' commitments or beliefs and integrating them into the hegemonic national culture.”

It has been twenty-seven years since Professor Plumb, now Sir John Plumb, delivered the Ford lectures at Oxford University. In a prose that was elegant, spirited, at times colloquial, always luminous, he offered a persuasive explanation for the growth of political stability in eighteenth-century England. Later published as The Growth of Political Stability in England, these lectures were widely read and the explanation offered in them widely accepted. Professor Plumb's thesis became and remains the orthodox interpretation of the political stability that England enjoyed in the eighteenth century.

During the past twenty-seven years, however, a considerable literature has appeared concerning the growth of political stability, some of it occasioned by Professor Plumb's own fertile suggestions. Historians such as J. V. Beckett, Lloyd Bonfield, Christopher Clay, Linda Colley, Norma Landau, John Owen, John Phillips, and Nicholas Rogers have studied the rise of the great estates, the decline of party, the role of patronage, and the politics of deference. The appearance of this literature offers a useful occasion for looking once again at the growth of political stability. In particular, it offers an opportunity to ask how valid is the Plumb thesis, and, if found not to be valid, what alternative explanation can be given for the growth of political stability in eighteenth-century England.

The last fifteen years have seen an efflorescence of scholarly studies of British fascism between the wars. Once identified exclusively with the figure of Sir Oswald Mosley and dismissed as a wholly derivative imitation of its Italian and German counterparts, fascism in Britain is now understood as a complex and variegated phenomenon whose roots run no less extensively in British political culture than in external influences. As historians have probed more deeply into the ideological underpinnings of the British ultra-right, they have made increasingly apparent the numerous connections between this new form of political mobilization and long-standing tensions within British politics and society. While scholars continue to acknowledge the many important ways in which British fascism was indebted to its Continental equivalents, they can no longer maintain—as did Robert Benewick in 1969 in his groundbreaking survey of the radical right—that fascist policy was developed “with a callous disregard for principles” or that the distinctively fascist elements of British ultra-right ideology were imported en bloc from overseas.

It is all the more surprising that existing histories should have overlooked so completely one of the most important “indigenous” components of British fascist ideology - its preoccupation with the Irish question. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Irish sentiment became a principal theme of several leading fascist groups, exceeded in prominence only by anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, to which it was often explicitly linked. For these small, politically marginal societies, the formulation and dissemination of hibernophobic ideas held obvious attractions.

After years of tinkering with the notion of police reform, Parliament in 1829 passed the Metropolis Police Improvement Act, which established the famous Metropolitan Police Force, England's first body of uniformed, fulltime “professional” police. Bodies of the “new police” were allowed to spread outside of London by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. These provincial forces answered to local authorities, a pattern disrupted in 1839 when Parliament passed three bills establishing centrally-controlled police forces for Birmingham, Bolton, and Manchester. These Acts were emergency measures, with a three-year duration, designed to hurriedly provide forces of new police in towns that seemed threatened by Chartist unrest. In the case of Birmingham a combination of aggressive Chartist activity—which produced two major riots in the summer of 1839—and fierce political in-fighting between the town's elite factions convinced Parliament that the new force, to be commanded by ex-army officer Francis Burgess, should answer to the Home Office in London rather than to Birmingham's radical/liberal (and therefore perhaps untrustworthy) Town Council.

All of the forces of new police that appeared from 1829 to 1839 faced common problems, ranging from recruitment and retention difficulties to disciplinary troubles, but perhaps the most serious challenge confronting these new forces was the hostility of many of the citizens the forces were intended to protect. Opponents of the new police forces voiced their concerns that the forces amounted to a second standing army, that the new police could be used for domestic spying, and that they were too expensive to justify any benefits they might possibly provide. While all of the new forces experienced this type of opposition, the environment in Birmingham was particularly hostile for the force created by Act of Parliament in 1839.

This article examines the seminal contributions of Britain's marriage counseling and therapy services toward cultivating a new emotional purpose for marriage in the decades following World War II. It presents two related narrative threads. First, it argues that psychologically oriented relationship services attracted government support because they supported the postwar ideal of a classless democratic society. Pioneering practitioners promoted a universalized view of citizens’ emotional relationships—rather than their socio-economic circumstances—as the determining fact of their lives. Second, it argues that these services provided a compelling language and set of concepts for articulating transforming understandings and expectations of marriage in the decades after 1945. To this end, the article reveals how the language and concepts of marriage therapists were mobilized by divorce reformers in the 1960s, and helped replace the offense model for divorce petitions with a less punitive psychological model of relationship “breakdown” in 1969. Britain's postwar marriage welfare services endowed stable harmonious families with crucial social and political importance as the bedrock for postwar social reconstruction and the most fitting environment for children and adults alike to develop into fully mature and self-realized democratic citizens.

One of the strangest facts about intellectual life in the Victorian years in England is that for most of the period there does not seem to have been any intellectuals. There was no group of people designated as “the intellectuals” or even “the intellectual elite.” Only if one chooses to take a functional definition of intellectuals—for instance, people “who create, distribute, and apply culture, that is, the symbolic world of man”—then can it be said that Victorian England had “intellectuals.” However, Egyptian temple priests, medieval monks, and modern university professors can all be grouped this way. Thus this definition is misleading, for not all thinkers have stood in the same relation to their own societies, nor have societies looked upon their thinkers in the same way, or even considered that the various kinds of thinkers should be considered as a group or class. In the Victorian period, from about 1830 to 1870, the English almost never used phrases such as “an intellectual” or “the intellectuals” as nouns to denote a particular kind of person or group of persons. Such phrases had been used in the romantic period, and they were readopted with increasing frequency from the 1870s on; but in the early and mid-Victorian years, the English used terms such as “men of letters,” literary men, poets, prophets, scientists to denote those who gave symbolic interpretation to experience.

The change in usage from “men of letters” and other such terms to “intellectuals” was no trivial change in linguistic style; rather, it marked a profound transformation of the economic, social, and conceptual relations in which the writers and thinkers stood.

On June 27, 1777, the Reverend William Dodd, “the Macaroni Parson,” Master of Arts and Doctor of Laws in the University of Cambridge; first Grand Chaplain of Modern English Freemasonry and sometime Chaplain-in-Ordinary to His Majesty; Chaplain of Magdalen House, a “Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes”; proprietor of the Charlotte Street Chapel, and a principal instigator of such other charities as the Society for the Release of Debtors and the Humane Society for the Resuscitation of the Apparently Drowned, was hanged at Tyburn for forging the signature of his patron and former pupil, Philip Stanhope, fifth earl of Chesterfield, on a bond for £4,200. Dodd's story, culminating in his trial, condemnation, and execution, despite massive efforts to procure a mitigation of the law's severity, survives best in the literary history and biography of the period. On the other hand, historians, whether political, social, or cultural, have had little or nothing to say about his predicament and suffering except as either the deserved nemesis of a swindler or an early cause celebre in the raising of public concern about the state of the criminal law. The probable reason for this neglect is that, for all the sentimental frisson which it aroused, Dodd's case was a middle-class melodrama which lacked plebeian dimension and appeal.

This article uses fifteenth-century Chancery court bills to demonstrate how women negotiated solutions to social and legal disputes not just in Chancery but through a variety of legal jurisdictions. This approach sheds light on women's actions in courts where the records have not survived, and it also adds nuance to the long-running debate about whether equity was a more favorable jurisdiction for women than the common law. By bringing into view other jurisdictions—such as manorial, borough, and ecclesiastical ones—it demonstrates how litigants might pursue justice in a number of arenas, consecutively or concurrently. Some women approached Chancery because they did not think they would get justice in a lower court, while others were keen that their cases be sent back down so that they could be fully recompensed for the offences against them. A fuller understanding of the disputes to which Chancery bills refer complicates our understanding of why women “chose” Chancery. Chancery is only one piece of the puzzle of how women negotiated justice in late medieval England, but its records can also shed light on some of the missing pieces.

This article examines the relationship between shame and police court media trial reports. It explores the social and cultural mores that underpinned the construction of shaming practices in trial coverage and assesses the ways in which the media functioned as a judicial and extrajudicial shaming resource. Far from disappearing with changing sensibilities, as has been argued elsewhere, premodern religious and judicial shaming methods shifted into areas of modernity, being relayed, supported, and influenced by new forms of modern print culture. The media, this article contends, served as an extension of the disciplinary apparatus, with editors applying their own assumptions about the guilt of the accused regardless of judicial verdicts and in line with their own notion of “common-sense” lay justice. The use of shame, though, was discriminatory—mirroring, and even helping to define, middle-class notions of shameful behavior and masculine and feminine conduct—which would, crucially, expose the social and cultural confines of media censure.

In January, 1696, Parliament passed an act to reform the procedure used in treason trials. The consequences of this act were immense. It immediately changed the complexion of treason trials from that of conciliar hearings aimed at eliminating the government's enemies to that of actual trials which sought to establish guilt or innocence. Moreover, Parliament subsequently extended some of the key provisions of this act to criminal law proceedings, thus giving the 1696 statute a claim to being one of the well-springs of legal reform in modern England. Most important of all, however, was the effect the act had on politics. It helped to bring to a close an age in which politicians frequently attacked their opponents with charges of treason, and it thus played a part in opening a new age, one where less violent practices were employed in the political struggle.

It is not the least of ironies in English history that an act as important as the Treason Trials Act of 1696 should have received so little scholarly attention. The only historian to give the act more than a few pages is Samuel Rezneck in an article written in 1930. Most historians who work on the period follow the practice of such scholars as G. M. Trevelyan, David Ogg, and Sir Keith Feiling, and either fail to mention the act or note its passage in a sentence or two. Many scholars, especially those of an earlier generation, seem to assume that the act was a natural, perhaps inevitable, reaction to Stuart tyranny—that it was part of the light brought in by William and Mary at the end of a dark century—and, hence, that there is little need to discuss it.

George Yule's “Independents and Revolutionaries” suggests that in many respects he and I are not so far apart. We agree that a “rigid two-party view” of Interregnum politics is a mistake, that not all members of the Rump were political Independents, that “Independent” was not commonly used as a political term after 1648, and that the clue to the events of 1648-49, the climax of the Puritan Revolution, lies in the existence of a group of genuine radicals who can and ought to be identified. He also seems to agree in one place that the criticisms of his statistical methods in The Independents in the English Civil War which I advanced in “The Independents Reconsidered” are justified, though in another he argues that the table in The Independents enables the reader to surmount these difficulties. This being so, if a technical dispute over methodology was all that remained between us, his latest article might well be left unchallenged. It contains, however, a number of assumptions about seventeenth-century religion and politics which are either unfounded or need serious qualification, and on which a few further comments are necessary.

First, as to method. It is true that the table referred to enables the reader to obtain Yule's estimates of the total numbers in various groups, such as (a) “Fled to Army, 1647,” (b) purged, 1648, and (c) Rumper, and of how these break down by social position and religious affiliation. But nowhere is there any entry for all of Yule's allegedly Independent M.P.s and of the breakdown for these, nor is there any way of obtaining it from the table.