In recent years, historians have brought into sharper focus the role of rebellion in the political, social, and religious life of sixteenth-century England. Indeed, the Tudor dynasty established itself on the throne in 1485 as a result of a successful baronial rebellion, and each succeeding generation experienced a major rebellion as well as numerous lesser stirs and riots. Until the revival of interest in Tudor rebellions, the majority of historians preferred to portray the century as an era of law and order in which a strong but popular monarchy ruled over grateful and largely obedient subjects. Although contemporaries living in the sixteenth century knew of rebellion and popular disorder, often through direct personal experience, the government quite understandably opposed anything resembling impartial and disinterested study of the rebellions. Government propagandists denounced rebellion vigorously in royal proclamations and manifestos, while the clergy echoed similar themes from the pulpit. Of the two histories of rebellion published during the sixteenth century, the first, John Proctor's history of Wyatt's Rebellion, was unadulterated government propaganda, and the other, Alexander Neville's history of Kett's Rebellion, was a polemic written in Latin to guarantee a select readership. Without specialized books on rebellions, the literate public had one primary source of historical information, the general chronicles that appeared with greater frequency and variety as the century progressed.

Although best known for his Survey of London, John Stow was the most prolific chronicler of the sixteenth century. Beginning with the brief octavo A Summary of English Chronicles, which appeared in 1565, Stow published no fewer than twenty-one editions and issues of chronicles in three different formats, the octavo Summary, a sextodecimo abridgment of the Summary, and the more substantial Chronicles and Annales of England in quarto.

For over two generations, scholars have studied Sir Edward Grey's response to the Sarajevo crisis, apparently considering every aspect of his dual effort to find a diplomatic solution while convincing the cabinet that England must intervene in a general war. Historians have generally agreed that Grey's last hope to prevent war evaporated by the end of July, although the cabinet did not decide to intervene until August 2. In this light, the events of August 1, 1914, are only considered to be either a prelude or a postscript to more significant events. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that Grey pursued two distinct, yet interrelated, courses of action on August 1, 1914: (1) for as long as he was unsure of cabinet support for intervention, he sought to make a diplomatic deal with the German ambassador so that a neutral England could salvage something from the crisis, but (2) once confident England would enter the conflict, he sought to prevent the war altogether by applying diplomatic pressure on France.

Historians have overlooked Grey's diplomacy on August 1 primarily because of the cloud cast over the events of the day by the so-called misunderstanding between Grey and the German ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. The first Grey-Lichnowsky exchange took place that morning when Sir William Tyrrell, Grey's private secretary, brought a message to the German embassy. After subsequently receiving a personal call from Grey, Lichnowsky, at 11:14 a.m., sent a wire to Berlin in which he indicated Grey had proposed that, if Germany “were not to attack France, England would remain neutral and would guarantee France's passivity.”

Welshmen and Scotsmen provoked their stronger neighbors of England in the late thirteenth century into wars that almost filled the reign of Edward I. Whether in keeping with “Manifest Destiny” or not, King Edward accepted the provocation of the Welsh and sent his troops into their land in an attempt to subjugate them; by a workmanlike series of campaigns he conquered and pacified them between 1277 and 1294. Then began an almost unbroken period of war against the Scots, a period lasting well beyond Edward's own death in 1307. By their persistence and by their tactics the Scots forced Edward and his people to a major effort, one that made every Englishman aware of his obligation, whether to fight, to feed the fighters, or to support the fighters with works.

For medieval soldiers, like their modern descendants, war was mostly a matter of working and waiting. Battles punctuated the wars, then as now, and at these times the combat troops spent their strength. During the long stretches between battles, however, support elements continued to supply the troops and put them into position to fight. The men in the armies of Edward I who kept the war going in this way and kept going themselves were the auxiliaries: the ditchers, woodcutters, smiths, carpenters, paymasters, provisioners, and the engineers. Important as they were in medieval warfare, the engineers have received little credit for it. Their work, bridging, building fortifications, and operating artillery, rarely rates a description in a chronicle and they receive little notice in secondary works.

Beliefs about the Devil informed Scottish piety in a myriad of ways. This article explores, in particular, the experiential relationship between Reformed theology, the practice of introspection, and demonic belief. It locates a process of profound anxiety and self-identification as evil that occurred during inward, personal engagement with Satan. This process, loosely coined here as “internalizing the demonic,” reveals the close and consequential relationship between the clerical promotion of self-surveillance and the widely internalized belief in the Devil's natural affinity with the “evil hearts” of men and women. Through an examination of English texts circulated in Scotland and a brief comparison with Protestant groups abroad, this article suggests that internalizing the demonic was a defining component of experiential piety not just in Scotland, but also throughout the Reformed Anglophone world.

Immigration and its consequences is one of the most contentious issues in the contemporary world, and historians are engaged in this debate by offering a longer-term perspective. In recent years, research on the United Kingdom's population has placed greater emphasis on population movement in shaping Britain's story, identifying waves of migrants from elsewhere alongside migration within Britain. One neglected aspect of this narrative, however, is the migration of Scots to England, particularly in the age of the regal and parliamentary union, when the changing political relationship between the two kingdoms had an impact on the scale, geographic spread, and opportunities and obstacles of that migration. While a minority of Scottish migrants were unwelcome, or chose to return home, the overwhelming weight of evidence is for those migrants who remained in England. The focus in this article is on that majority group for whom migration was a positive experience, thus raising questions about why these Scots were so successful and why they faced so little native opposition. That process of segmented assimilation offers an insight into the formation of Britain and the shifting ground of national identity associated with the emerging British state. The Scots, moreover, provide a model for “successful” migration, suggesting that a range of factors—principally, an educated, culturally malleable, and economically responsive migrant population, alongside an institutionally and attitudinally flexible host community—need to be in place in order to optimize the chances of migrant assimilation.

What better laboratory for an experiment in racial integration could there be than the nascent community of a new town? The architect Roy Gazzard posed this question in 1969, as he embarked on designing the new town of Killingworth in northern England. A self-proclaimed “social engineer,” Gazzard applied his experience as a town planner in colonial Uganda to shaping a new community in the postimperial metropole. Historians have long recognized the way that built forms were translated from metropole to colony, but the reverberations of colonial planning in the postwar European welfare states have received little attention. In this article I use intellectual biography to chart the trajectory of notions of community, spirituality, space, and place as they migrated from colonial Uganda to postimperial Britain. I focus on the career of Roy Gazzard, an outspoken social engineer and devout Christian, who hoped to use his colonial urban planning experience to counter what he saw as the increasingly secular and centrifugal forces in modern British society. An examination of letters, private paper, lectures, planning documents, and diagrams held in the newly opened archive of Gazzard's work illuminates the course of colonial expertise as it was refracted back into the postcolonial metropole.

Tudor statesmen, in their statutes and debates, and Tudor jurists, in reports and treatises, recorded their awareness of an antithesis between regal power and political law. Political action and juridical argument made them increasingly sensitive to an oppugnancy between executive authority and constitutional control. Medieval men of law, too, had noted this inconsonance in England's polity. Sir John Fortescue, while Henry VI's Chancellorin-exile in 1468, faced the dilemma; but he resolved it only verbally. He wrote: “regal power is restrained by political law.” Then he added, “such is the law of the Kingdom” of England. So facile a formula as Fortescue's might make nice theory, yet it was one easier to prescribe than to apply to a live monarch.

The pragmatic Tudors, however, succeeded in surmounting the antithesis between political law and regal power, paradoxically, by augmenting both. To solve immediate political crises and to enhance the effectiveness of government, Privy Councilors and parliamentarians passed act after act that increased the King's prerogatives. At the same time, moreover, these very statutes afforced, by implication, the principles of political, or public, law. Kings and queens, judges and councilors, Lords and Commons during the sixteenth century formulated a concept of the rule of law and made it transcendant. By the 1590's they had accorded the rule of law statutory, judicial, and regal recognition. For the Tudor time-being, this principle served to balance regal power and political law and to give to this antinomy a congruity.

In 1959 C. P. Snow turned a phrase that continues to shape our perceptions of intellectual life in the twentieth century. Intellectuals, he observed, were divided into “two cultures,” the arts and the sciences, and between them stood “a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” That gulf constituted a crisis, because while literary intellectuals were said to control the heights of power, only the scientists possessed the knowledge and vision necessary to confront the problems of the modern world. Snow’s argument attracted widespread comment on both sides of the Atlantic, and its continuing purchase is attested to by the Cambridge University Press’s reprint of the lecture in 1993 with an introduction by Stefan Collini.

In contrast to the spirit of laissez-faire, the Colonial Office under Gladstone's first government served as a large-scale social engineering agency concerned with the cautious restructuring of volatile societies in the sugar-producing colonies of the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. From the perspective of the Colonial Office civilizing the barbarian made him more governable. There is a revealing paradox in the fact that so much of what Victorian Liberals did in the name of civilizing benighted natives involved active government initiatives in imperial settings. Under the banner of “peace, retrenchment, and reform” nineteenth-century British Liberals advocated cost-cutting and laissez-faire at home and non-expansion abroad. Liberal leaders' public statements in this vein helped set the historiographical stereotype of supposed Gladstonian Liberal “little Englandism” versus a dramatic imperial policy shift toward “forward movement” in the Disraelian Conservative era. Scholarship over the last thirty years has refuted this older view and has stressed the continuity of British imperialism throughout the nineteenth century. However, a careful examination of the details of policy reveals that from 1868–74 the Liberals not only valued the Empire, but were willing to sacrifice their own theories of limited government in order to strengthen the British hold—even on their bankrupt sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Indian oceans. Initiatives in colonial religion, education, health, justice, and labor regulation demonstrate a surprising Liberal bent toward government activism in the non-white Empire. Moreover, the self-conscious and energetic manipulation of such a wide range of policy tools reveals a serious Liberal commitment to empire, which further belies the old notion that from 1868–74, “little Englandism” reached its high point.

On Whitsunday in June 1593 William Sinclair of Galwaldmuir and two of his sons attended a kirk near Stirling to hear the Sabbath day's sermon. Perhaps they and some of their fellow parishioners were inspired by hearing the word of God, but not everyone in the neighborhood was in a forgiving mood. Just after they left the kirk, “immediatlie aftir sermond,” the Sinclairs were attacked by Sir Archibald Stirling of Keir and several of his followers. When the melee was over, the three Sinclairs lay dead. This was no random act of violence. Rather, it was part of an ongoing feud; Sinclair of Galwaldmuir had earlier been involved in the killing of Stirling of Keir's brother James. The discord originated with a disputed title to the lands of Auchinbie in the parish of Dunblane. The Sinclairs claimed that they held it in feu from the king, while the Stirlings countered that they held it on similar terms from their kinsman William Chisholm, bishop of Dunblane, and they had backed this with a royal confirmation of the feu charter the previous December. The attack was also a significant incursion of profane activity into sacred space—an act situated in such a way as to maximize its dramatic impact.

By following the course of the Sinclair-Stirling feud to its conclusion and also drawing on other examples in which officials of Scotland's Reformed Kirk became involved in conflicts, either as peacemakers or antagonists, this article will examine two related issues.

Propaganda overseas was vital to Britain in the Second World War. She could not easily confront her enemies alone and survive, much less win. It was imperative to keep her allies united, her empire and the commonwealth loyal, and neutrals benevolent—or perhaps, even, to get them committed to her side. These were the objectives of British propaganda overseas in war time. Despite foreign-office objections, the Committee of Imperial Defense (CID) in the mid-1930s gave responsibility for this work to the Ministry of Information (MOI), which was to be established on the outbreak of war. Meanwhile, ministry machinery had to be planned, and the policies which would govern its work had to be determined. These responsibilities were given in 1936 to Sir Stephen Tallents, public relations controller for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Britain's leading expert on advertising publicity. Yet, neither the machinery nor a policy was ready when the war began in September 1939. The ministry and the country, as Phillip M. Taylor has indicated, was inarticulate, if not quite speechless, at the start of the “war of words.” Britain was able only to conduct propaganda to enemy countries, because plans for that work earlier had been removed from MOI control.

Conflicts in the planning process created this situation in which two factors stand out. MOI planners were hampered at the start by departmental and personal feuding, which was permitted because no war emergency existed, and, after 1937, by the adherents of appeasement policy who dominated Whitehall. Stephen Tallents stood on the firing line most visibly as the government, led by an economy-minded treasury, discouraged planning any propaganda machinery for war time which might even hint at serious propaganda deployment in peace time.

Since the time of the British “Great Depression,” and with increasing urgency as the relative decline of the British economy has gathered pace in the twentieth century, economists and economic historians have sought to explain both depression and decline and to suggest remedies. Until recently, it has been fashionable to ascribe the decline to the failings of British management, often working in conjunction with workers and trade unions, and to focus attention particularly on the failure to innovate, to adopt inventions which would have significantly lowered British production costs and improved international competitiveness in the manufacturing industries which were the basis of British prosperity. In the last fifteen years, however, studies of specific industries and investment decisions have made this global explanation for British decline less attractive, so much so that a recent summary of these studies can conclude that:

Frank Ives Scudamore remains one of the least known of those Victorian civil servants who were, to use Sir James Stephen's phrase, statesmen in disguise. Readers of Trollope's autobiography may recall that Scudamore, the novelist's younger rival in the Post Office bureaucracy, emerged the victor in their 1867 contest for the department's Second Secretaryship. Indeed, it was Scudamore's triumph which finally convinced Trollope to resign from the Post Office in order to devote full time to writing. Yet Scudamore's importance has a much more substantial foundation than this incident in literary history. Even if one does not completely accept the Spectator's judgment that Scudamore was “perhaps the very ablest [civil servant] in the service of the crown,” he was still an administrator of fundamental consequence. As director of the first significant experiment in nationalization undertaken in modern British history—the 1870 acquisition of the telegraphs—Scudamore played a major role in the growth of the modern state.

Scudamore's impact on the course of government expansion has not been sufficiently studied and explored. It is certainly correct, as Professor Perkin recently pointed out, that the Victorians talked more of nationalization than actually attempting it. However, the fact that Scudamore was involved in an unusual activity does not mean that the endeavor was minor or the results unimportant. After all, he managed a department which in 1874 had over 3,600 offices spread in a network across the entire country and which collected over £1,000,000 in gross revenue. Such an operation deserves historical consideration in its own right.

England during the early Restoration is a fascinating case of the cultural fertility of counterrevolution. The problem of the reimposition of authority following the destruction and revival of such traditional institutions as monarchy, bishops, and nobility led to a variety of new expedients, rather than simply the return to old verities that one might expect from the somewhat misleading term “Restoration.” Historians such as Jonathan Scott and Richard Greaves have remarked upon the continuing challenge posed by oppositional ideologies dating back to the Revolution, republican and/or radical Protestant, in the England of the Restoration. Historians such as James Jacob, Margaret Jacob, Patrick Curry, and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, have traced the ways in which the new science and Baconian ideology participated in the effort to find new bases for authority in the still unstable England of the time following the Civil War and Interregnum. John Gascoigne, in his recent history of Cambridge University in the eighteenth century, refers to the nexus of establishment politics, rational religion, and natural philosophy that originated in the Restoration and dominated the eighteenth century in England as the “holy alliance.”

This article will examine two important, and largely neglected, documents of the early Restoration, the Discourse Concerning Prodigies (1663) and the Discourse on Vulgar Prophecies (1665), both by the Anglican clergyman and scholar John Spencer. These works, produced in response to a specific challenge to the Restoration state, contributed to the creation of a Baconian scientific ideology in the 1660s, and its “holy alliance” with Latitudinarian religion. This article also examines, in turn, Spencer's political, religious, and natural-philosophical arguments. By demonstrating the connections between them it demonstrates that the “holy alliance” predated the development of Newtonian physics, and that Spencer, neither a natural philosopher nor one of the well known Latitudinarian divines, contributed to it.

A paper of this title must inevitably be extremely selective. The subject is complex and the available material vast in bulk. As Paul Langford has recently shown with his study on the first Rockingham administration one could conceivably do justice to it at the rate of one volume a year for much of the period 1763 to 1776. I can do no more in the compass of this paper than pursue one or two themes which appear to be emerging from the mass of recent detailed scholarship. Moreover, I am going to take a major, though I hope justified liberty with my title, and treat of policies as well as politics. After all the second is not fully intelligible without the first. This paper does not adopt a “structure of politics” approach. Thanks to the initiatives of Sir Lewis Namier in that field we now have a pretty full knowledge of the structural framework of British politics during the revolutionary crisis, and this provides useful guidelines for understanding the ebb and flow of political controversy—as the recent work of Paul Langford and Peter Thomas bears admirable witness. But knowledge of political structure tells us little about the essence of the arguments connected with the American question. We cannot understand the politics unless we understand the policies which were at issue.

In 1462, in defense of the House of Lancaster, Sir John Fortescue wrote that Edward IV could not cure the king's evil, the disease scrofula, by touching the afflicted since to do so one must not only be a king but also a legitimate one. To touch one needed not only to be annointed with holy oil but the person must also be the legitimate heir. Lancastrians claimed that Edward IV could not touch since he was not the rightful king. Wrote Fortescue, he “wrongly claims to enjoy this wonderful privilege. Wrongly … [because] this unction is powerless because Edward had no right to receive it.” Sir John goes on to argue by analogy, and scornfully asks: “Would a woman who received ordination thereby become a priest?” Of course not. Continuing this line of argument, Fortescue adds that a usurper would not be the only one unable to cure by touch.

Joseph Chamberlain startled many in Great Britain in 1895 when he informed Parliament that he “regarded many of our colonies in the condition of undeveloped estates. ” At the same time he announced the British Government's intention to consider “the judicious investment of British money” in British Crown Colonies to develop them “for the benefit of their population and for the benefit of the greater population which is outside. ” He thus not only signalled the Government's willingness to attempt alternative methods of development, but specifically proposed a new approach. However, this new approach required a change in attitude by those who supervised the colonial empire. The permanent officials at the Colonial Office had to be persuaded to give high priority to colonial economic development and to be more sympathetic to and cooperative with developmentally oriented colonial governors. The permanent officials were never so persuaded.