The tradition of thought known as civic humanism has recently occupied the attention of a number of commentators. Not only has it been examined in the place of its birth, Renaissance Italy, and more especially Florence, but in a recent work J. G. A. Pocock has traced the influence of the tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and finally in the New World. The question considered here is the particular use to which civic modes of thought and argument were put by a group of moderate reformers in the debates on parliamentary reform in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Although this period has received attention from social and constitutional historians, it has not been discussed by historians of ideas.

Civic humanism is both an analysis of a political problem and a range of recommendations as to how the problem is best to be solved. The problem is defined in terms of the deleterious effects of time on political organization. Human organizations rely on the ordered and rule-governed behavior of individuals. Such behavior exhibits, over time, a constant tendency to disintegrate into selfish action. Political and legal institutions provide the immediate incentives to prevent this happening. Yet how can these institutions themselves be safeguarded or rendered self-regulating?

The solution to the problem of achieving political stability through time is seen essentially as a moral solution, that is to say it is seen to lie in the creation of a particular set of attitudes towards political life amongst the citizens of the polity.

If liberal England died strangely, no moment in its passing was more bizarre than the close encounter it experienced between the army and a political system from which the military had been banished since the seventeenth century. Habitually all but invisible at home, confining its exploits to lands without the law, and maintaining a political silence equal—though in easier circumstances—to that of the neighboring grande muette, the British army moved to the center of the public stage. It obtained a popular following. This was not merely the result of Britain's involvement in world war. Manifestations of popular militarism, albeit sporadic or marginal, were evident in the later nineteenth century. The second Boer War accelerated a shift in social attitudes. Hostility to “pro-Boers,” if not beginning to resemble the hysteria of 1914, adumbrated the response of a shaken community temporarily recovering cohesion through warlike solidarity. Most public energy was expended in mafficking, but vocal groups continued to campaign for national efficiency and universal military service. The scout movement was the precipitant of a considerable mass sentiment, solidarized by suspicion of Germany and giving back a faint but clear echo of the leagues formed to support the expansion of the German army and navy.

Yet if a novel enthusiasm was eroding traditional aversion to the army, it was scarcely capable of creating a public tolerance for its involvement in domestic affairs. Unlike the navy, whose nature more or less precluded its domestic employment, the army was a suspect weapon. The cultivation of nonpolitical professionalism represented in part a functional response to such public suspicion. Modern major generals would not think of doing what their Cromwellian predecessors had done.

In the society of late medieval Europe, where power, wealth, and influence were derived from the ownership of land, the delegation of responsibility by the ruling elite became a matter of financial, administrative, and political necessity. Not only was it physically impossible for a great rentier to oversee personally routine points of organization on his estates, but the overwhelming litigiousness of contemporary life also made it essential for any property owner of note to engage the services of men practiced in the law. Furthermore, regular consultation with leading members of his following played a crucial part in determining the success—or even the survival—of the magnate in question. Just as an astute monarch recognized the importance of the deliberative process, making himself accessible to his ablest and most powerful subjects, so too the great lord had to involve his kinsmen and supporters in questions of policy and politics. In the right hands the seignorial council could, therefore, become a formidable weapon, sometimes even providing an alternative power structure to the government itself. A striking instance of this usurpation of authority is to be found in tenth-century Japan, where the administrative council of the dominant Fujiwara clan effectively superseded the central bureaucracy of the Heian state. Indeed, it was from the chambers of this body (known as the Mandokoro) that the real government of the country was carried out. The old framework was carefully preserved, and the great council of state continued to perform a ceremonial function, but, so far as practical control was concerned, the orders of the Fujiwara advisers took the place of imperial decrees.

The assembly of the Long Parliament in November 1640 witnessed an outburst of passionate hostility toward recent royal policies in church and state. “The Common-wealth hath bin miserably torne and macerated,” declared Harbottle Grimston, “and all the proprieties and liberties shaken: the Church distracted, the Gospell and Professors of it persecuted, and the whole Kingdome over-run with multitudes and swarmes of projecting cater-wormes and caterpillars, the worst of all the Aegyptian plagues.” Yet, as Kevin Sharpe has recently reminded us, “to those on the road during the 1630s, the journey seemed far from a headlong rush towards conflict.” Sir Henry Wotton could write in 1633 that “we know not what a Rebel is; what a Plotter against the Common-weal: nor what that is, which Grammarian[s] call Treason: the names themselves are antiquated with the things.” To resolve this flat contradiction requires much further research into the politics and government of Charles I's Personal Rule. In particular, a clear picture of the political behavior, relationships, and attitudes of many public figures is still lacking. This article therefore presents a case study of one prominent individual: Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, privy councillor and lord chamberlain to Henrietta Maria. These offices gave Dorset an exceptional opportunity during the 1630s to “see more clearly into [the king's] intents and actions.” Moreover, both official sources and personal correspondence should reveal his activities during the Personal Rule and his attitudes toward it. What follows will examine in turn Dorset's duties as the queen's lord chamberlain, the political influence that this office conferred, his work as a privy councillor, his relations with various factions, and his private opinions of the regime and of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.

Who were the Independents? This is one of the unsolved puzzles of the English Civil War. Contemporaries gave differing answers. To some they were the godly; to others they were “the godly gang.” They were both a Puritan group and a political segment of the Long Parliament. S. R. Gardiner and the Whig historians tended to make a clear connection. Religious Independency was for toleration, and the political Independents were, simpliciter, the party of toleration opposed to the intolerant Presbyterians. This view was broadly accepted until 1938 when it was permanently shattered by J. H. Hexter, whose penetrating article showed that many political Independents (and for this purpose he defined them as the Regicides and those who survived Pride's Purge) were elders in the established church which after the Westminster Assembly had a Presbyterian form of government. He therefore urged that the term Independent was really a label for the most ardent political Puritans applied to them by the more conservative.

Then in 1953 H. R. Trevor-Roper in his brilliant essay on “the Gentry” introduced a new approach by equating the Independents with the lesser and declining gentry who had been shut out from the spoils of court office and therefore pursued a policy of decentralization.

It was at this stage that I wrote an introductory study on the problem of the Independents that questioned in part the suggestions put forward in both these works. Against Hexter I urged that the term Independent had a greater religious content that he allowed, for many of his “Independent” Presbyterian elders in fact became Independents in religion or certainly veered in that direction.

The study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy, led not only to conflicts but also to some of those conflicts becoming violent. Focusing on Belfast in the summer and autumn of 1969, this article sets out how the main political actors asserted competing claims to popular sovereignty and traces how multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts became arrayed around the central one.

Between the First and Second World Wars, two retired British military officers, Francis Yeats-Brown and J. F. C. Fuller, embraced fascism and yoga. In their publications and lecture tours, they used their past experiences as soldiers in India to encourage strength, discipline, and virility. While Fuller believed that yoga could teach men to be strong and powerful leaders, Yeats-Brown celebrated yoga as a part of “Aryan” racial inheritance. This article examines both Fuller's and Yeats-Brown's published accounts and archival trails in order to understand the development of global masculinities within individual British lives. It reveals that their engagement with yoga was a defensive effort to appropriate the “regeneration” of martial masculinity encouraged by Indian nationalists. Claiming yoga for “great men” and “Aryan” audiences became a way to rewrite their own histories of service to the British Empire. They erased the weakness and fragility of imperial life, and replaced it with idealized bodies that were strong, disciplined, and virile. In so doing, they attempted to save imperial soldiers from political and cultural irrelevance. This reimagining used imperial hierarchies of gender and racial difference to encourage a “universal” model of martial masculinity that could restore the power of the British Empire.

When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was elected leader of the Liberal party in the House of Commons in January 1899, the party already was divided over the issue of imperialism. By the end of the year, the Boer War had accentuated that division. During the next six years, this disagreement over imperial policy was converted into a struggle between CB (as he was known to his contemporaries) and the Liberal Imperialists for control of the Liberal party. In the course of that struggle, Lord Rosebery, the leader of the Liberal Imperialists, repudiated CB's leadership; the Liberal Imperialists established their own organization, the Liberal League; and finally, the three most prominent Liberal Imperialists in the House of Commons—H.H. Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, and R.B. Haldane—tried to force CB to become a prime minister in the House of Lords before they would serve under him.

Despite the obvious talents of the men involved, the Liberal Imperialists failed in their efforts either to capture the Liberal party or to dislodge CB from his position as leader. Because CB's leadership in opposition has seemed weak, there has been a tendency, even on the part of his sympathetic biographers, to attribute his success in beating back the Liberal Imperialist challenge to pluck and luck rather than to political skill. CB was plucky in his willingness to stick with the thankless task of leading a divided party whose most prominent members—Rosebery, Sir William Harcourt, and John Morley—insisted on acting as alternatives to CB both as definers of policy and as focuses for the loyalty of Liberal M.P.s. CB was lucky in that the actions of the Unionist government of 1902-1905 reunited the fractured Liberals.

Histories of human rights tend to focus on defining moments, clear instances of universalism triumphant. If we hold to this model, the 1855 campaign on behalf of French republican—or democratic socialist—refugees was a failure. The refugees, expelled from Jersey in the Channel Islands for a libel of the queen, were little liked, and the campaign on their behalf did not yield the desired results, enabling them to return to Jersey. Yet, as this article argues, the failed campaign ought to be judged by different measures than the campaigners’ desired results, for we see in it the dynamics of refugee crises down to the present: an ongoing attempt to make refuge a universal norm in the face of persistent doubt that the refugees in question were “worthy” of staying. The French refugees and their supporters drew public attention to a right that they claimed derived from precedent, the British constitution, and moral principle. Though they did not succeed in their immediate cause, campaigners drew the admission even from naysayers that there was a “right to refuge”—but one the naysayers would not agree must be upheld at all costs.

This article explores one of the strangest and most spectacular urban policies in postwar Britain: national garden festivals. Initiated by Margaret Thatcher's government, the festivals were vast state-sponsored gardening shows held in deindustrializing cities to reclaim derelict land for the property market. A festival was held every other year between 1984 and 1992 in a different city, five in all. The garden festivals showcased a new kind of urbanism, one that would change the ways that British cities related to nature, to capital, and to the wider world. First, they evinced a unique type of environmental politics—an implicit critique of urban industrial landscapes that was distinct from both the emerging critique of climate change and from older ideas about conservation. Second, they emerged at a time when the attraction of private capital was becoming increasingly central to urban regeneration. The festivals were at the forefront of this turn, outsourcing their events to corporate sponsors. Finally, the festivals offered an idiosyncratic, incoherent version of globalization. They courted a global pool of tourists and capital and invited delegations from across the world to plan events while, in many instances, reinforcing a preexisting racialized social hierarchy shaped by imperial legacies.

Since the publication of Christina Garrett's The Marian Exiles in 1938, historians have had to look outside the confines of England and into the structures of the various exile communities on the continent in order to comprehend fully the significance of the reign of Mary I. Garrett's argument was that the large number of Englishmen who emigrated to the continent in 1553 and 1554 represented not a headlong flight from persecution but an organized migration of English Protestants seeking a more felicitous religious climate with the tacit approval of the queen's government. These men and women functioned as a church in exile, responsible only to their own governors, and cut off from the traditional authority of the Crown. Thus, on returning to England after the accession of Elizabeth, this group constituted a coherent faction, the Puritan opposition, which was hostile to the conservative nature of the Elizabethan settlement and dedicated to the establishment of a Calvinist polity.

However, instructive as this theory may be for the emigre communities in Germany and Switzerland, it does not answer a number of important questions which arise from the political activities of the Marian exiles; nor does it adequately investigate the composition and conspiratorial policies of the two other major groups of Marian exiles, the French and the Venetian. Indeed, Garrett does not even discuss the existence of a separate company of expatriates resident in the Venetian Republic, even though in terms of political and intellectual history this community of exiles played by far the greatest role in the organized opposition to the rule of Philip and Mary.

The historiography of Tudor economic legislation has been preoccupied with two questions: firstly whether any consistent economic planning, or simply expedient reactions to various problems, can be discerned in Elizabethan policy; and secondly whether and to what extent policy was imposed “from above” by William Cecil and the privy council, or influenced “from below” by local and factional lobbying. Since the 1980s the research of Geoffrey Elton and his successors has extended our understanding of Tudor parliaments; yet the standard accounts of Elizabethan policy-making have on the whole paid insufficient attention to contemporaries’ perceptions and interpretations of economic change, upon which their suggested solutions and arguments for reform were based. As several studies of particular policies have shown, such as Norman Jones’ analysis of usury statutes, and Paul Fideler’s work on poor relief, the evolution of economic policy in sixteenth-century England can fruitfully be approached by cutting through the rhetoric of preambles and policy statements, and by focusing on the strategies of persuasion underlying debates in Parliament and beyond.

The main feature which distinguishes Scottish local government from English local government in the later eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century is the presence there of professional men—the sheriffs. The sheriff, and later the sheriff-substitute, was the key to the legal and administrative system in the Scottish countries. He had no English equivalent. Essentially he was a representative of the central government who administered justice at the local level. After the reforms of 1748 the sheriff was a bureaucrat in the finest sense—highly trained and efficient. The substitute acquired strict standards more slowly, but by 1830 he too had to meet high standards in training and performance.

Before the mid-eighteenth century, the sheriff had hardly been a progressive figure. Indeed, the Scottish sheriff typified the backward state of Scottish local government, a state which had been little affected by the Act of Union. In 1700 Scotland lacked a uniform system of justice. Independent franchise courts and hereditary rights to judicial offices, including that of sheriff, were common throughout the Lowlands. They were relatively rare in the Highlands, because the king's justice had never made sufficient headway to make possible or necessary these particular legal perversions.

The most recent biography of Lord Durham begins with a comparison between the affection felt by the people of his county for Squire Lambton, and the lack of attention paid by the nation to the co-author of the first Reform Act and the author of the Durham Report. A neo-Grecian temple, built by the Freemasons of county Durham, overlooking his seat at Chester-Le-Street is visible for miles, and provides a stark contrast to the London town house at 13 Cleveland Row, which lacks even the familiar blue plaque to serve as a reminder that Radical Jack once lived there. The illustration is apt. Traditional deference paid by a county to a “friend of the people” who made his mark in the larger world accounts perhaps for the existence of the temple; less easily explained is his failure to earn that respect usually accorded a public figure of his significance, and it is curious, at first glance, that a man of his abilities and achievements should be regarded as an outcast by his own government. Yet the fact remains that for most of the 1830's, Durham was regarded as little more than a nuisance by his colleagues, who, following the passage of the Reform Bill, entrusted him to no position of authority in England.

In 1471, King Henry VI of England died in the Tower of London amid disputed circumstances. Between his death and Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s, he was venerated as a saint and martyr. Modern historians have generally dismissed this cult as a political phenomenon, created and used by the Tudors as they sought legitimacy. While there is some truth in that assessment, political allegiance was only a part of the impetus for the participation of Henry’s devotees in the cult. Alongside carefully crafted (and perhaps, artificial) portrayals of Henry’s virtues lay something else his former subjects found compelling: his very real political failures, and more importantly the adversity that they engendered. Henry’s devotees used these royal adversities as the basis from which to imagine a sympathetic relationship between themselves and “good King Herre” in which he had great concern for their fatal and near-fatal emergencies. These neglected devotional aspects of Henry VI’s cult are the subject of this article.

In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported seeing airships in the night sky, yet there were none. It was widely assumed that these “phantom airships” were German Zeppelins, testing British defenses in preparation for the next war. The public and press responses to the phantom airship sightings provide a glimpse of the way that aerial warfare was understood before it was ever experienced in Britain. Conservative newspapers and patriotic leagues used the sightings to argue for a massive expansion of Britain's aerial forces, which were perceived to be completely outclassed by Germany's in both number and power. In many ways this airship panic was analogous to the much better known 1909 dreadnought panic. The result was the perfect Edwardian panic: the simultaneous culmination of older fears about Germany and the threat of espionage, invasion, and, above all, the loss of Britain's naval superiority. But, in reality, there was little understanding about the way that Zeppelins would be used against Britain in the First World War—not to attack its arsenals and dockyards, but to bomb its cities.

King John Lackland was surely one of the most enigmatic figures ever to rule England. The dramatic ambivalence of his personality, the passions that he stirred among his own contemporaries, the very magnitude of his failures, have made him an object of endless fascination to historians and biographers. Whose interests would not be piqued by the man who was recently described by a distinguished scholar as “cruel and ruthless, violent and passionate, greedy and self-indulgent, genial and repellant, arbitrary and judicious, clever and capable, original and inquisitive”?

As one might expect, King John has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Nearly every historian who touches on any aspect of his reign feels compelled to offer his own judgment of John's puzzling character, his effectiveness, even his personal morality. The present century has seen, in addition to numerous specialized studies of various facets of John's reign, no less than three major biographies of that indefatigable but luckless king. The first of these, by Miss Kate Norgate, was published in 1902 and reflects the traditional viewpoint of the late nineteenth century. The second, Sidney Painter's work of 1949, stresses the monarch's relations with his baronial and administrative subordinates and presents a more genial and sophisticated interpretation of John himself. Hopes for a promised companion volume dealing with military and naval institutions and the development of the common law under John have been shattered by Painter's untimely death.

In the spring of 1884 shortly before his viceroyalty came to an end, Lord Ripon wrote in an urgent manner to Lord Kimberley, then Secretary of State for India, about one of the more critical questions of policy confronting the Government of India: “You may rely upon it that there are few Indian questions of greater importance in the present day than those which relate to the mode in which we are to deal with the growing body of Natives educated by ourselves in Western learning and Western ideas.” Ripon was pointing to the existence of a new class of English-educated Indians within British-Indian society and to the failure of the Government of India to acknowledge this class and to absorb its talents and influence within the structure of British-Indian administration. That this problem begged for a realistic solution by 1884 and that it would continue to do so in the years ahead, he had no doubts whatsoever; it had been left too long to fester in a mode both damaging to the class itself and dangerous to British rule. In short, the English-educated Indian class had become a question of policy.

Simply stated, as the opportunities for Western collegiate education expanded and the avenues leading towards entry into the East India Company's service became available, the doors either failed to open or were placed out of the reach of the educated Indians seeking entry. By 1850, with the new class in existence in limited numbers in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi and with additional graduates appearing annually to swell its ranks, frustrations began to emerge as the graduates found themselves unable to secure the public employment which the Charter Act of 1833 had implied was to be their just right.

It has been nearly half a century since R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in spite of many efforts to refine and to dispute Tawney's thesis, the work has retained great influence over sixteenth and seventeenth-century English historical studies. There is considerable debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, but amidst this disagreement there is a basic acceptance of the idea that the Puritan “work ethic” and the development of an entrepreneurial spirit were related to each other. Tawney suggested that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labor and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. Thus, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier religious reform movements:

Tawney was speaking of the “later stages” of Puritanism; he took his examples entirely from post-restoration works.