This article explores the formation of British imperial identity through a focus on the career of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), a well-known Whig intellectual and imperial careerist who originally hailed from the Highlands of Scotland. Using Mackintosh's unpublished letters and autobiography, the article shows how he imagined and narrated his relationship to the Scottish Highlands from the vantage points of Bombay and London. In contrast to recent historiography that has focused on the translation of Scottish society, culture, and identity in British imperial spaces, this article argues that disidentification from the Highlands of Scotland and the erasure of different peoples, cultures, and textures of life was integral to Mackintosh's configuration of a British imperial identity.

The historiography of the Financial Revolution in Scotland remains underdeveloped. This article addresses that gap by rounding out the rough sketch that currently represents our understanding of Scotland's Financial Revolution by focusing on the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland's first new financial institution in more than thirty years when it emerged in 1727. The case is made that the Scottish Financial Revolution was a complex movement, very often separated from the state and driven by the agency of Scotsmen at home and abroad, and that 1727 denoted a phase of the revolution in which financially innovative projects returned to the country after a period of absence. The article demonstrates how the progress of the Financial Revolution ebbed and flowed in the country, contingent upon political circumstances, from the nascent economic developments of the 1690s and on to the political upheaval of the early eighteenth century.

The opinion of modern scholars is divided about the nature of Anne Boleyn's relationship to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. On the basis of a few of his verses and three Catholic treatises, some writers have concluded that Anne and he were lovers. In these analyses not enough attention has been paid to the role of Henry VIII, the third member of this alleged lovers' triangle, who guarded his own honor and inquired into that of his wives, before, during, and after their marriages to him. A comment on the way in which the king viewed and defended his honor will be useful to this examination of the evidence customarily accepted as proof of Anne and Wyatt's love affair.

A gentleman's honor, as Henry's contemporaries perceived it, was a complicated concept. First and foremost it was assumed that a man's birth and lineage would predispose him to chivalric acts on the battlefield where, in fact, only one cowardly lapse would stain his and his family's reputation forever. Secondly, the concept embodied the notion that it bestowed upon its holder certain social privileges and respect. During Henry's reign, moreover, the “realm and the community of honour” came to be viewed as “identical” with the sovereign power of the king at its head. One result of this “nationalization,” was that the behavior of crown dependants and servants affected the king's good name in both a personal and a public sense, and his ministers took care to do all that was appropriate to his reputation in settling disputes and in negotiating treaties.

Despite West End producers' and critics' expectations that it would never turn a profit, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928) became the most commercially successful First World stage drama of the interwar period, celebrated as an authentic depiction of the Great War in Britain and around the world. This article explains why. Departing from existing scholarship, which centers on Sherriff's autobiographical influences on his play, I focus instead on the marketing and reception of this production. Several processes specific to the interwar era blurred the play's ontology as a commercial entertainment and catapulted it to international success. These include its conspicuous engagement with and endorsement by veterans of the war, which transformed the play into historical reenactment; the multisensory spectatorial encounter, which allowed audiences to approach Journey's End as a means of accessing vicarious knowledge about the war; and a marketing campaign that addressed anxieties about the British theatrical industry. Finally, I trace the reception of this play into the Second World War, when British soldiers and prisoners of war spontaneously revived it around the world. The afterlives of Journey's End, I demonstrate, suggest new ways of conceiving of the cultural legacy of the First World War across the generations.

Histories of the Great Fire of London regularly mention and reproduce Valentine Knight's scheme for London's reconstruction, published in 1666, and note that he was imprisoned for his pains. His proposal, with new streets laid out on a rough grid and a canal through the heart of the city, has attained a walk-on part in longue durée histories of urban planning. However, Knight has remained a mysterious and little studied figure; the significance of his imprisonment and of the fact that his was the only scheme to be published remain unexplored. By reconstructing his biography and discovering the reason for his incarceration, and by relating his and the other proposals for the rebuilding of the capital after the fire to the history of public opinion, this article uses this episode to explore the tacit rules governing the discussion of public affairs in Restoration England. Further, by examining the publication history of all the immediate post-fire schemes for rebuilding London from 1666 to 1750, it traces how architectural plans gradually became objects for critical discussion in the worlds of print and periodical.

In the violence over Protestant marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s much of the debate centered on two towns, Portadown and Drumcree. Students of seventeenth-century Irish history will note that those towns were sites of some of the most infamous stories of rebel atrocities in the 1641 uprising. The continuity of such images reinforces the notion that ethnic and religious conflicts are immutable and perhaps inevitable. A certain fatalism surrounds the acrimony of Arab and Jew, Muslim and Christian, English and Irish arising from the conviction that such conflicts have raged, as if unchanging, over centuries. However, when viewed over time, the struggles between such groups are dynamic rather than static and have helped construct how each group sees the other and how it identifies itself. In the dynamism surrounding Anglo-Irish relations a number of important turning points can be identified. One of the most important is of course the seventeenth century, particularly the 1641 uprising. More than thirty years ago W. D. Love noted how for three centuries Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish intercourse had been molded by the events of the mid-seventeenth century and had compelled historians to support or deny the charges made by each side about the events of the 1640s. In trying to understand the searing nature of those events, and how they came to frame political as well as historical debates from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a number of historians have noted the importance of Sir John Temple and his propagan distic piece, The Irish Rebellion. Temple's work offered not just an interpretation of the 1641 uprising but a portrait of the two peoples, English and Irish, as basically and permanently incompatible—a thesis that has had remarkable staying power. Published in 1646, Temple's work was a departure from the Tudor and early Stuart canon on Ireland. While Temple borrowed much from earlier commentators such as Edmund Spenser and Sir John Davies, his analysis differed from them and set out in a new direction by defining the Irish as ethnically distinct. Spenser and Davies suggested that the problem of Ireland arose not from the land, or even its people (although Spenser devoted considerable discussion to the ways Irish customs undermined English success), but from foolhardy or poorly executed English policy. Even though the late Tudor and early Stuart commentators saw the Irish as barbaric, the Irish were thought to be amenable to the benefits of English culture and rule, although their reformation might require draconian measures. Even the divisive issue of religion was not thought insurmountable. Davies and Spenser argued that a religious reformation begun after peace and stability had been secured in Ireland would succeed. In contrast, Temple viewed the 1641 revolt as conclusive evidence that the Irish were irredeemable and posed a deadly threat to England and its people.

The band of gentlemen pensioners, a body which, diminished in size and its functions altered almost beyond recognition, still survives at the English royal court under the title of “The Honourable Corps of Her Majesty's Gentlemen at Arms,” was instituted on Christmas Eve 1539 as part of a reform of the royal household. The group was a revival of the “spears” or “spears of honour,” an elite, sumptuously-outfitted royal bodyguard of gentlemen founded by Henry VIII in 1509, shortly after his accession, which appears to have lapsed in 1515 or 1516, because of the great charges involved in their maintenance, according to Hall's chronicle. The revived group was provided for in a rather more modest manner than its predecessor had been, but its members served much the same purposes. They were the king's elite bodyguard, his personal companions in arms when he went to war, the principal participants in tournaments and other martial sports at court and, more generally, a courtly and military finishing school for the sons of nobility and gentry.

From 1540 until 1670, when the band underwent its first reduction in size, its structural organization remained unchanged in all essentials. It consisted of fifty men and five officers, a captain, lieutenant, standard-bearer, clerk of the check and harbinger. The last two were ancillary offices, the keeper of the “check-list” or attendance roll and his deputy, and were not strictly speaking members of the corps, but its servants. The lieutenant and the standard-bearer were normally men who had served for a time as gentlemen pensioners before being appointed to these offices, while the captain, on the contrary, was a figure of some importance at court in his own right, and one who had not previously served in the band. After the death of the first captain, Sir Anthony Browne, Henry VIII's master of the horse, in 1548, subsequent captains under the Tudor and early Stuart monarchs were all peers and almost always held other great offices of state. Browne's successor, William Parr, marquess of Northampton, was Edward VI's lord chamberlain; he lost all of his offices and titles on Mary's accession and was lucky to escape with his life. Thomas Radcliffe, lord Fitzwalter, later earl of Sussex, succeeded him in the captaincy, holding it continuously until his death in 1583. From 1572 he held the office of lord chamberlain to the queen. His Elizabethan successors in the captaincy, the first and second lords Hunsdon, father and son, the queen's kinsmen, also held the lord chamberlainship.

A number of Victorian writers identified a change in the episcopate in the nineteenth century: Dean Burgon, for example, believed that a remodeled episcopacy emerged at this time. Historians have advanced the view that the changes were generated by the Whig ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s. Indeed it is part of the schemata of ecclesiastical history that bishops in the eighteenth century were fundamentally different from those in the nineteenth century. Yet, as C. K. Francis Brown admitted, there has been no attempt to establish a pattern of this in the career and social history of the nineteenth century episcopate. This is all the more surprising since a structuralist analysis of the Caroline and Hanoverian episcopate has existed for some years. The traditional view of Church history, that the ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s were the principal engine of change, have tended to overlook the structural changes in bishops' career patterns and that there was a change in the concept of the episcopal function. The context of this changed concept of episcopal duty is important. Recent work on the professionalization of the clergy has focused on the immediate impact of the Reformation and the development of the Church as a profession up to the early eighteenth century. Rosemary O'Day and Geoffrey Holmes have demonstrated that between 1580 and 1730 the clerical profession became increasingly stratified. The overpopulation of the clergy in the eighteenth century accelerated this trend, establishing a Church in which there were extremes of wealth and poverty. At the same time the clergy were subject to greater lay control than any other emergent profession. This tension between professionalization and institutions of the state has been examined in other occupations, but throughout the nineteenth century it grew stronger in the Church. From patronage of a living to nomination to a see, laity dominated the Church. In spite of Whig reforms of the 1830s and 1840s lay control established strict parameters within which the professionalization of the episcopate occurred. The effect of control from outside the Church was that the paths to the bench of bishops remained more numerous and varied than the limited paths to the elite of other professions like the judiciary. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw functional trends that brought about the professionalization of the clergy. These changes have been thoroughly analyzed by Anthony Russell. The self-conscious spirituality of the Tractarian movement also effected changes in the popular view of the clerical function, and the episcopate was not immune to these changes. By the closing decades of the nineteenth-century bishops were appointed whose careers had been touched by these trends. Equally important were developments within the episcopate that altered the bishops' roles.

A dozen years ago Conrad Russell initiated a major historiographical debate when he rejected the traditional interpretation of seventeenth-century parliamentary history expounded in the classic studies of S. R. Gardiner and Wallace Notestein, whose work on early Stuart parliaments dominated the field for three quarters of a century. According to Russell, Gardiner's and Notestein's conviction that Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were the scene of escalating constitutional conflicts between the Crown and the House of Commons was the result of the two historians' failure to understand either the nature of early Stuart politics or seventeenth-century notions of Parliament's proper functions. Politics in general and parliamentary politics in particular were devoid of ideological content, and the provincial gentry who filled the benches of the House of Commons were as certain as the rest of their countrymen that the “proper business” of Parliament was the passing of bills, not the debating of issues of national or constitutional significance. Russell, of course, did not suggest that the conflicts so crucial to the traditional interpretation were made out of whole cloth, but he did deny that disagreements between Crown and Parliament were due to the emergence of a constitutional opposition. Instead, such disagreements were the inevitable product of the pervasive tension that marked the relationship between the royal government in London and the local communities in the provinces. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Crown's incompetent parliamentary management made it more difficult than usual for local gentlemen to reconcile their obligations to their king with their loyalties to their communities. The result was some remarkably unhappy parliaments, but since no important issue of principle divided parliamentary leaders from privy councilors or officers of state, there could be no organized, ideologically based opposition, no constitutional crisis leading inexorably to civil war.

When Keith Thomas wrote “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” he could not ignore the so-called Marprelate Tracts, which are famous lampoons on Queen Elizabeth's bishops. But they are a problem, because they are examples of what can only be termed Puritan humor. No one yet has described them as the work of a “funny Puritan.” Those words repel each other. So we usually say they were the work of a “Puritan sympathizer.” Funny Puritans don't exist, almost by definition. Professor Thomas searched for an acceptable expression and finally dismissed the episode—seven pamphlets which have been called “The best prose satires of Elizabeth's reign”—as “bizarre.” In his view, then, it is all simply inexplicable, and he hastens to assure readers that “not only the Church but also its Puritan opponents condemned Martin [the pseudonymous “Martin Marprelate”] for treating the matter with such levity.” Here we have the Puritans we know and love, the ones whom H. L. Mencken defined as those who live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

But English Puritan literature for children reveals other anomalies in this characterization. Puritans and (after 1660) “Dissenters” wrote a great deal for children, more than any other group in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of it is tedious if not downright grim, including some of their attempts at humor. But much of it was intended to give pleasure. The purpose of this article is to look into the strangely neglected subject of Puritan humor through the prism of their works for the entertainment of children.

As historians have long recognized, the “perfidious Machiavel” of the stage was by no means the only image of Machiavelli in the minds of English intellectuals before 1640. Besides frequent denunciations of the Florentine as a devious, amoral politician and an atheist (most of them sincerel a few pro forma), one encounters in English works of theology, moral and political philosophy, and history two other approaches to Machiavelli the political scientist. Some writers, with or without acknowledging their source, mined II Principe and the Discorsi for detailed information. Slowly, tentatively, and sometimes surreptitiously, others worked toward a partial appropriation of Machiavelli's political analysis. The scholarly consensus, however, is that before Machiavelli's new paradigm could be fully accepted in England, a major shift in the political situation had to occur. Only with the coming of the Civil War would writers like James Harrington unreservedly endorse Machiavelli's rejection of the medieval world view in favor of classical political wisdom, which they held to be directly applicable to modern English circumstances.

King Stephen's reign has long been recognized as a crucial period for monasticism in England. Many authors have written about alleged anarchical conditions during those nineteen years, and scholars have done a great deal of work on twelfth century English monasticism; nevertheless, comparatively little attention has been paid to the impact of this supposed anarchy on the monastic establishment. This impact is the concern of this essay. Due to the limitation of space, I will confine myself to the material damages suffered by monastic houses during Stephen's reign and will offer an extended summary of my findings.

The traditional picture of anarchy in England during Stephen's reign is that the civil wars wreaked havoc with nearly all aspects of life and inflicted massive and long lasting material damages. Medieval writers—most memorably the Peterborough chronicler— emotionally depicted scenes of terror and devastation, and the majority of later scholars—most notably H. W. C. Davis—upheld the basic validity of this picture. During the past century, however, historians have somewhat modified the traditional view. Whereas most medieval writers described an England embroiled in internal warfare for nearly all of Stephen's nineteen year reign, modern scholars have realized that the area of active fighting was more limited and that actual warfare lasted less than half of the reign. Also, modern scholars have shown that many of the occurrences in Stephen's reign were not characterized by aimless chaos and confusion, but rather by purposeful actions directed towards specific ends.

This brief account of Tocqueville's ideas on aristocratic society and government in England is intended to serve as a sort of introduction to the longer papers that follow in this symposium. For some years the subject of English aristocratic power in the 19th century—especially in connection with the First and Second Reform Acts—has been much discussed. The discussion has dwelt on such questions as whether the aristocracy grew or declined in power, whether the Reform Acts made for a growth or loss of power, whether aristocratic leadership knew precisely what it was doing, and so on. So far this discussion has been carried on, so to speak, exclusively from the inside: that is, in terms of contemporary English events and ideas. In Tocqueville, who was both an Anglophile and an informed and penetrating observer of England from the 1830s until his death in 1859, we have a distinguished outsider. His ideas are always interesting for their own sake. For this symposium they have the added merit of touching on some of its central themes. On occasion, his ideas may strike the reader as exaggerated, ambiguous, even inconsistent, certainly without system. But they are usually suggestive, and merit the historian's serious attention.

Tocqueville's first impression of the English aristocracy was one of great power—a power rooted in its monopoly of landowner ship. As he saw it, the contrast between the French landowning aristocracy and the English was that between an aristocracy, on the one hand, that was land poor, and an aristocracy, on the other hand, that was richly endowed in land. Tocqueville also saw that if landed property did not always lead to economic power—since agriculture did not pay that well—it had a special quality, as compared to other forms of wealth, which was bound to lead to political power.

“He that stoppeth his Ears at the Cry of the Poor, he also shall cry and not be heard” was the warning of Thomas Lawson to Parliament at the time of Charles II's restoration to the English throne in 1660. Lawson, a Quaker school teacher and notable botanist, addressed his special appeal for poor relief to the Restoration Parliament. He, like other Quaker leaders of his day, urged those in authority “let not a Settlement for the Poor be forgotten.” The Quaker movement drew its members from a cross section of the social orders of seventeenth-century England, including a significant number of poor from the lower orders. Although appeals for poor relief were not unique to the Quakers, Thomas Law-son expressed a typical Quaker viewpoint of social obligation to the impecunious. The Quakers consistently addressed the problem of poor relief within their community in practical terms from their earliest organization in 1652.

In the last hundred years the British initiators of the Industrial Revolution have fallen behind one after another of their imitators. As a consequence, the issue of “modernization” has moved to the head of the political agenda in a nation that was for the nineteenth century world the very model of “modernity.” Much of this change in world position was inevitable — yet not all of it. Why, historians have recently been asking, did Britain between 1870 and 1900 lose the economic dynamism that had been her hallmark? Why, further, did the British fail to recover this lost dynamism in the twentieth century?

The British experience ought to be of particular interest to Americans today, for recently we have become aware of the costs as well as the benefits of economic growth. Our faith in material progress is dimming. At the same time, our former economic dynamism seems now in question. Indeed, we may be repeating the experience of Britain.

To understand the change in British economic behavior, we must look at more than solely economic history. As Max Weber argued as far back as 1904, economic activity takes place in a wider social context. Attitudes and values play a vital role in shaping economic behavior. Development economists have discovered in the last two decades that economic change is not produced solely by economic means — by introducing technology and capital alone. To some degree at least, societies “choose” their economic futures by the values they hold. Because of this, intellectual and social history may tell us much about the difficulties of continuing modernization in twentieth century Britain.

There is no question that the plantation of Ulster during the reign of James I had a profound effect on the course of British history. However, the nature of that plantation has been either misrepresented or misunderstood. In order to overcome this problem, we must address two provocative questions: (1) Were the Scots-Irish, the largest group of settlers, predominantly Celtic or non-Celtic ethnically and culturally? and (2) If they were mainly Celtic, why were they better able than non-Celts to establish viable settlements in Ulster, a predominantly Celtic area? A reexamination of the origins of the pre-1625 Scottish settlers and their methods of settlement indeed casts the problem of the Ulster Plantation in a new light.

For the last two decades, historians have begun to question the portrayal of the Scots-Irish, or Ulster Scots, as frugal, hardworking, anglicized Presbyterian Lowlanders who brought the light of civilization to a benighted Celtic backwater. For example, Nicholas Canny correctly dismisses the “myth” of Ulster's material transformation by pointing out that the province, unlike Leinster and Munster, was settled by British planters from less economically advanced areas of the archipelago. But, again, he does not adequately examine the cultural and ethnic background of the dominant Scots-Irish. Traditionally, they have been classed as “Lowland,” non-Celts rather than as “Highland,” Celtic Scots. These designations are misleading because they oversimplify Scotland's historical and cultural divisions that had been in place as early as the Norman invasion.

The industrial revolution greatly expanded opportunities to become wealthy, but not all opportunities were “legitimate.” Most writers emphasize that the context, or social structure, in which laws are framed make aspects of commercial behavior “illegal” or “criminal.” The context is an imposed evaluation of modes of behavior and action based on conflict resolution. This generalization has merit and, irrespective of ideological nuance, neatly packages the process through which social interest is said to attain legislative legitimacy. Such achieved legitimacy is, however, sometimes challenged, notwithstanding the participation of the challengers themselves in the process of formulation. The letter as well as the spirit of laws may be ignored, and illegal activities may flourish. These white-collar crimes—offenses against property committed by persons of “respectability and high social status”—tend to be ascribed to individual greed and opportunities created by weaknesses in the enforcement of the laws. Businessmen are damned by implication, and the solution usually recommended is more consultation, more laws, and better enforcement. Recent studies of the increasing incidence of such crimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have adopted this interpretation to criticize the new entrepreneurial culture. Complaints have been directed particularly at a “chaotic” banking system that abetted supposedly widespread speculation and fraud during and following the Napoleonic wars. Proofs of misconduct rest on contemporary calls to curb the extravagances of entrepreneurs and private bankers, on references to repeated financial crises, on a few famous cases of fraud and robbery, and on a more general indictment culled from literature's many mustache-twirling villains.

Richard II, one of the most puzzling kings of late medieval England, has been the subject of controversy ever since his forced abdication in 1399. He often has been portrayed as a tyrant or, at times, as a madman by historians. Recently the trend is toward a reassessment of Richard's reign free from the biased Whig interpretation of the past. R. H. Jones took a first step in that direction in 1968 with the publication of The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Middle Ages. Jones viewed Richard as a king inclined toward absolutism but lacking the taint of rancorousness or despotism ascribed to him by historians since Stubbs. Subsequently two books, a Festschrift, and several articles have appeared, delineating more aspects of the reign. Since May McKisack's volume in the Oxford History of England series appeared in 1959, the number of works concerning the reign has been steadily growing. The recent publication of Anthony Tuck's Richard II and the English Nobility offers an opportunity to reexamine the place of Richard II in history. The divergence of scholarship since 1959 from the traditional interpretations will be seen as the major constitutional problems of the reign are scrutinized. After first examining the influence of William Shakespeare and William Stubbs in shaping the historiography of the reign a chronological discussion of the period from 1377 to 1399 will follow.