Whatever else it might be, whatever its other functions or activities in modern democratic societies, a political party is first and foremost an organization that seeks control of government through the electoral process. Unless it first attains the legitimate governing authority that accompanies majority status, a political party cannot implement the policies necessary to realize its vision of the just society, nor can it fulfill the other roles assigned to parties by modern democratic theory. For just such reasons, it is commonly said that votes are to political parties what profits are to corporations; just as corporate behavior would be incomprehensible without reference to the profit motive, so party behavior is often inexplicable without recognizing the centrality of electoral competition. For parties with normative goals in countries with democratic political systems, the drive for electoral supremacy must be a constant concern.

Francis Bacon wrote his The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh during 1621 after his fall from power and during his initial period of disgrace. He had, of course, contemplated some such history for a long time; and his exile from the Jacobean court allowed him time to complete this project. Exactly how much “research” he did remains a matter of debate. But this history of Henry VII exists as an exceptional example of Tudor-Stuart historical writing. Given Bacon's fascination with questions of history, broached in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and expanded in De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), one might reasonably expect to find an example of Bacon's practice of history. The History of Henry VII exists as Bacon's only finished full-scale history of an era, although other fragments survive.

A favorite scholarly pastime, at least since the late nineteenth century, has been to detect Bacon's “errors” in his history—that is, how and where he got things wrong. Sometimes, for example, he apparently duplicated the error of a source. He does not, however, stand alone among historians on this score. In any event, modern historical research affords a clearer view of the accuracy of Bacon's account. None of this detracts, however, from Bacon's considerable achievement. Part of the recognition of his accomplishment derives from understanding the different influences that impinge on Bacon's writing Henry VII. I intend, for example, to assess the indebtedness to the life of the Jacobean court as a model or influence on Bacon's portrait of King Henry's relationship with his wife Queen Elizabeth.

On the titlepage of his collection of sermons, The Happinesse of the Church (1618), Thomas Adams styled himself “preacher” at St. Gregory’s, London. The term could indicate puritan leanings, and in the nineteenth century Robert Southey went so far as to call Adams “the prose Shakespeare of puritan theologians… scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy.” Adams often used the word “puritan” pejoratively. Historians, however, have classified as puritans people who rejected the term for themselves, just as political analysts-sometimes justly-classify as “liberals” or “conservatives” politicians who cavil at these terms. The problem, as always, is one of definition, and Adams affords an excellent opportunity to test the adequacy of our definitions. Like “humanist” or “republican,” “puritan” is one of those terms that have come to have a meaning that transcends the circumstances in which they originated. I argue that Adams was not a puritan; he was instead a mainstream Calvinist episcopalian of the kind so convincingly described by Patrick Collinson in his Ford lectures. Nevertheless, an attempt to place Adams in the spectrum of religious opinion has a value beyond merely getting one individual situated. Scholars have contradicted each other in their placing of Adams, and this analysis, by getting him right, will throw light on our understanding of the varieties of Calvinism in early Stuart England.

It has long been thought that the deposition and murder of King Richard II was a personal tragedy, and that “Richard's personality—his natural or inherited character considered apart from the important actions of his life—was the chief cause of his downfall.” In more recent years the aesthetic side of his Richard's character has assumed a new importance in explanations of his fall. Richard H. Jones, for example, has noted that “in any case the fundamental obligation of the medieval king was that he should lead his arrays on the field of battle. Yet, Richard was slight of frame and sensitive of disposition. His tastes were aesthetic rather than athletic.” As well, in the view of Bertie Wilkinson,

In 1811, William Robinson, a purser's steward in the royal navy, deserted, having served six long and brutal years at sea. Years later, he wrote his memoirs, under the colorful title of Jack Nastyface. In it he recorded the many indignities inflicted on the sailors of his day. He did so in terms designed to horrify polite men and women, toward which end he dwelled at considerable length on floggings, keel-haulings, and the like. He was, however, perfectly prepared to tolerate the indignities that sailors inflicted on a group even more marginal than themselves: the Jews who made an uncertain living peddling slops and trinkets outside the royal dockyards. In one passage, Robinson fondly remembered how a sailor had avenged himself on one such peddler, known disparagingly as “Moses.” The sailor, assisted by several of the crew, succeeded in appropriating a new suit of clothes; “Moses,” sputtering with rage, was forced to leave the ship “amidst the grins and jeers of the whole crew, who were much diverted and pleased to think that any of their shipmates had tact enough to retaliate so nicely on a Jew.”

The incident, at first blush, bears all the marks of anti-Semitism. It suggests that “Moses” was singled out precisely because he was Jewish; as such, it fits nicely with the claims of a new and very pessimistic generation of scholars. These scholars, in true academic tradition, have expressed a great deal of disappointment over the work of their predecessors.

By the time Henry II imposed a large donum on cities, knights, moneyers, and Jews in 1159, the English Jewry dwelt in at least eleven communities throughout the realm. Of these, the London community was certainly the oldest, having been established by the Conqueror. The origins of the other communities are much less certain. Records from the end of Henry I's reign suggest that the Jews of England were still based in or around London, though some indirect evidence suggests the presence of isolated Jews elsewhere in the kingdom. It seems clear, however, that the years falling between Henry I's death and the accession of Henry II—the reign of Stephen, commonly known as the Anarchy—witnessed an expansion of Jews throughout the country, marking this period as very important to the history of English Jews. The meager evidence surviving suggests three important points: first, that it was, in fact, in the reign of Stephen that communities of royal Jews spread from London into other English towns; second, that significant Jewish communities existed only in areas that remained under royal control during Stephen's reign; and third, that these new Jewish communities may have been fostered by Stephen to further his own political and fiscal interests. The paucity of the available evidence makes any case for the English Jewry in this period uncomfortably conjectural; nevertheless, the few scraps that exist suggest these points to be at the least plausible, if not indeed likely.

Like Professor Roberts, I, too, think that re-evaluation of J. H. Plumb's The Growth of Political Stability, 1625-1725 poses interesting questions. However, unlike Professor Roberts, I do not think that the scholarship of the past quarter-century has undermined the foundations of Plumb's book. In large part, our assessments differ because we interpret Plumb's book differently. Roberts questions Plumb's identification of the structures that stabilized English politics; but Roberts does not present Plumb's diagnosis of what had been destabilizing English politics, and why. I consider that diagnosis the foundation of Plumb's book, for I read Plumb as arguing that the government of independent gentlemen—even if it be government by independent gentlemen—is no easy matter. How to govern effectively without arousing the ire of those whose autonomy effective central government would inevitably infringe? How to avoid attracting the enmity of powerful landowners, of merchants with power of their own, and of a populace with an experience of rebellion egregious even for seventeenth-century Europe? Roberts does not argue with Plumb's diagnosis of the causes of instability. However, his own solution to that problem implies that Plumb's book is ill-founded, for Roberts never mentions the problems intrinsic to governing the independent. Instead, he proposes that England achieved stability because English politicians elaborated constitutional conventions that subordinated the monarch to Parliament, and because the Church of England no longer had to fear for its existence. Roberts is dancing to a Whig beat, but Plumb played a Country tune.

On June 15, 1624, Dr. Robert Vilvane informed the mayor of Exeter by letter of his displeasure with the haphazard application of poor rates in the city. Vilvane, who owned property within the city and in the surrounding countryside, was protesting the high rates imposed on his modest holdings in the city, since he was already subject to what he felt were excessive assessments on his country properties. Vilvane pointed out that he had taken it upon himself to support the purchase of armor and powder for martial officers, along with voluntary contributions to the poor, to churches, and to “sundry other taxes.” Despite a debt to the city in the amount of £500 (on which he paid interest), he did “freely give 12d weekly to two poor families here, which else would fall into penury.” Having recounted all this, he considered that “there is little cause to hoist me so high to all payments, who (besides my house) have little here [in the city].” At the crux of his argument, he asserted, was “that a Rate to the Poor is no competent Rule…both because it is uncertain…and also unequal, because some are set up too high, and others too low, by fear or favour.” Vilvane had contributed to a certain collection for the poor in a particular part of the city and noted that “many murmur at this day” about the collection, since it appeared that the overseers “did not disburse above half the Contribution.” As an unwilling party to this scheme, the doctor was upset, as he felt others were: “[I] do profess myself in this but an Echo of the Multitude, which are much aggrieved.”

Archibald Alison is perhaps more widely remembered from a brief-and disguised—reference in Coningsby than from any direct usage of his own voluminous writings: “Finally, Mr. Rigby impressed on Coningsby to read the Quarterly Review with great attention; and to make himself master of Mr. Wordy's History of the late War, in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories.” The dubbing of Alison as “Mr. Wordy” was one of Disraeli's most unerring shafts. Alison's History of Europe, covering the period 1789-1815, would have earned him that sobriquet on its own, to say nothing of the other books, pamphlets, and articles that flowed from his inexhaustible pen. The various editions of his History, most commonly in sets of twelve volumes, made Alison a quite celebrated historian in his own day. Long neglected in the twentieth century, the History has recently received some critical attention. Without seeking unduly to resurrect a departed reputation, Hedva Ben-Israel does at least acknowledge the History's earlier success: “It was by far the best-selling history of the French Revolution in England and America almost to the end of the century, and was translated into most European and several oriental languages.” Some fruitful comparisons between Alison's work and the more enduring classic by Thomas Carlyle have been drawn by Clare Simmons.

On the morning of 4 December 1514, a certain London merchant-tailor, Richard Hunne by name, was found hanging in his cell in the Lollards' Tower at St. Paul's. On the surface this event might seem to be of little concern to anyone except Hunne. However, the death of this moderately well-to-do London businessman became caught up in the agitation against the clergy which presaged the Reformation in England. Indeed, Richard Hunne's case has become, as well, the focal point of a major and long-lasting historical controversy over the responsibility for Hunne's death. This controversy arises out of contradictory and confusing reports of the circumstances surrounding the event and the peculiar actions of the authorities, both royal and clerical, over an attempt to fix the responsibility for the death. One major body of source material, particularly the writings of Sir Thomas More, holds that Hunne had committed suicide and is supported by the decision of a royal court which found those accused of Hunne's death to be innocent. The other, which includes several Protestant chroniclers and writers, holds that Hunne was murdered by the ecclesiastical authorities of London and is supported by depositions from a coroner's inquest into the matter.

The alleged facts of Hunne's death, minor event though it may have been, served to fan a wave of excitement in London, particularly since the event fell upon thoroughly receptive ears. The current anticlericalism received a major stimulus from Hunne's death.

It is difficult to document the extent to which anticlericalism was present in London, let alone England at large, in the early years of the sixteenth century, but there was a dispute between the parishioners of London and their rectors over such matters as tithes, offerings and mortuary fees.3 In addition there had been some action, in an official sense, against the greatly abused benefit of clergy.

Among the myths of the origins of World War I is that of the ability of obscure bureaucrats to influence the foreign policy of their country through intrigue and deceit. The foremost example in the volumious literature involved the unlimited capacity for evil attributed to Friedrich von Holstein of the German Foreign Office. One of his contemporaries left the. following portrait: “His life was devoted to poisoning human and international relationships. Holstein's diplomacy by intrigue, his vicious disloyalties, and the way he placed his own revengeful purposes before his country's good contributed largely towards the outbreak of the First World War.” Labeled the Grey Eminence of the Wilhelmstrasse in the aftermath of defeat, Holstein became the scapegoat for the disasters of German diplomacy in 1914.

Other bureaucrats of the pre-war era whose careers followed a similar pattern have received like treatment. On the British side, it was asserted, there operated a civil servant whose anti-German animus steered Britain into conflict with Germany. Allegedly possessing a fatal fascination for Sir Edward Grey, Sir Eyre Crowe was credited by historians with enormous surreptitious influence. The hostility toward Germany manifested by Great Britain in the decade prior to 1914, the argument runs, reflected Crowe's personal hatred and suspicion of German power. “The vast influence exercised by Sir Eyre Crowe upon British policy between 1908 and 1914,” wrote the distinguished Austrian historian A. F. Pribram in 1951, “only became generally known outside the Foreign Office, and especially abroad, in recent years.” Apologists for Germany cited Crowe as the prime mover of British policy, and one German historian termed him the ‘böse Geist’ [evil spirit] of the British Foreign Office.

In 1934-35 more than 11 ½ million adults in Great Britain completed the famous “Peace Ballot” (the official title was A National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments) designed to test, and indeed to demonstrate, popular support for the League and “the collective peace system.” The massive response exceeded all expectations and greatly impressed observers. It was, said the New Statesman, “the most remarkable popular referendum ever initiated and carried through by private enterprise.”

But what did the Ballot demonstrate? Did it return a “plain and decisive” answer as Lord Cecil of Chelwood, President of the League of Nations Union and Chairman of the National Referendum Committee, claimed?

Supporters of the Ballot had no doubt about the national verdict. Britons, said Cecil, had shown “overwhelming approval” of the collective system. They were, according to Winston Churchill, “willing, and indeed resolved, to go to war in a righteous cause,” provided that all action was taken under the auspices of the League. The British people were ready to fulfill their obligations under the Covenant, Philip Noel-Baker later wrote. The country was prepared to stop Mussolini by armed force if that should be required.

Eighteenth-century British chemistry presents the historian with an interesting paradox. As theorists, the British hardly distinguished themselves. Joseph Black, the foremost professor of chemistry during the second half of the century and a man of great intellectual ability, began his career with a brilliant paper on pneumatic chemistry and then promptly abandoned the world of published research. Skillful investigators such as Stephen Hales and Joseph Priestley made many important discoveries, but the theories they offered as interpretations of their observations created as many difficulties as they resolved. Although British chemists hypothesized with gusto, the aethers and phlogistons they invoked to explain chemical phenomena lacked intellectual as well as physical gravity and historians of chemistry have not yet succeeded in clarifying the relationship between this welter of ideas and Lavoisier's successful recasting of chemical theory during the final decades of the century. Despite the inadequacy of its theoretical concepts, however, philosophical chemistry flourished in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Although the absence of a unifying theory led to a rather undisciplined pattern of growth, the number of chemists actively studying philosophical problems certainly increased. Why did so many natural philosophers become interested in such a theoretically impoverished subject, and why, after two generations of intense investigation and reflection, were they unable to formulate an adequate general theory?

When Henry VIII raised Thomas Cromwell to the earldom of Essex, most observors were both dazzled by the ceremony and deceived as to its significance. The French ambassador Marillac had taken the measure of events, however. He had speculated that Cromwell would lose authority in religious matters, while perhaps retaining it in worldly affairs. Those whom Cromwell had put in the shade reserved “une bonne pensée” for him, Marillac said. And Cromwell's close ties to religious radicals (Friar Barnes and the Calais Sacramentarians) provided weapons to his enemies. Norfolk and his conservative friends feared further reformation might provide occasions for new waves of rebellion in a country already under diverse threats at home and abroad. They would not miss their chance to cast down the upstart.

Modern historians have dismissed Marillac's chief point, that Cromwell would fall because he had used his powers to make a ‘party’ in the State. Foxe, Hall and Burnet had seen the king's minister in that light. Many of Cromwell's contemporaries held such views. But the weight of Professor Elton's opinion has lain heavily on the subject. He dismissed Marillac as little more than an ill-in-formed gossip. Then, turning to the evidence of the Act of Attainder passed against Cromwell, the Cambridge wizard treated it with equal severity. Allegations that Cromwell had illegally retained heretical men, in order to have a force with which to defend error with sword in hand, were obviously contrived.

When I first began my researches into later Stuart history as a graduate student back in 1980, the Restoration was a relatively underdeveloped field of inquiry. Although there were a number of scholars producing excellent work in this area, there was not the same depth of scholarship as characterized study of the first half of the seventeenth century: wide gaps in our knowledge existed, and for some of the most crucial episodes of the period we were dependent upon a limited range of studies and dated works. The best general entrée into the period was still David Ogg's classic two-volume England in the Reign of Charles II, first published in 1934! A suitable modern textbook did not emerge until 1978, with the publication of J. R. Jones's County and Court: England 1658–1714, a book that had neither Ogg's range nor lively analytical style. For our understanding of why the monarchy was restored we were reliant upon a study that had come out in 1955, which was supplemented only in 1980 by Austin Woolrych's book-length “Historical Introduction” to volume seven of the Yale edition of the Complete Prose Works of John Milton. On the Exclusion Crisis we had J. R. Jones's The First Whigs, which had appeared in 1961, although for the first Tories we still needed to use Sir Keith Feiling's 1924 History of the Tory Party. For the Glorious Revolution we had a book written by a man who tragically died (at a young age) before he could complete the work, and another self-consciously thought-provoking work designed to raise questions and suggest future avenues of research—both excellent studies in their own right, but hardly the plethora of monographs that we possessed for the mid-century revolution.

Since his death Orwell's reputation has derived largely from the anti-totalitarian emphasis in his later writings, even if it is now widely agreed that Nineteen Eighty-Four in particular does not represent any sudden shift towards pessimism in Orwell's thought. This article argues that Orwell's understanding and critique of twentieth century developments was much wider than many of his readers still presume. Instead of being read only as an anti-totalitarian theorist, Orwell must instead by seen as a critic of modernity, of modern industrial civilization (in both its capitalist and socialist forms) and its hedonistic culture. Orwell's critique of hedonism and conception of its relationship to industrialism is probably the single most important area of his thought not to have received adequate treatment by scholars and critics. To appreciate its significance is thus to establish him as a more sophisticated social and political thinker than he is usually assumed to have been, as well as to show that too narrow a political reading of his work obscures essential features in its development. Orwell does, of course, oppose political tyranny even in his early works, but he also identified the characteristics of what he regarded as a distinctively novel and modern form of civilization, which underlay and to some extent provided the cultural and psychological bases for the emergence of new, totalitarian forms of tyranny.

That complex problems like the causes of the English civil war are constantly subject to reinterpretation is an obvious truism. Twenty years ago we were all embroiled in the gentry controversy; now it is the fashion to lay more stress on the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Lawrence Stone's recent survey is a case in point. Though his title, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, promises a long running start, this quondam disciple of R. H. Tawney places a surprising amount of emphasis on what he calls precipitants and triggers, which, it turns out, are the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Among these is the mishandling of the situation in Scotland. It is well known, of course, that the attempt to impose the new service book in 1637 touched off the chain of events which led to the Long Parliament, but historians have pointed out that this was by no means the first of Charles's errors there. At the very beginning of his reign came the act of revocation, which among other things rescinded “all grants made of crown property since 1540, … all disposition of ecclesiastical property and the erections of such property into temporal lordships.” No such sweeping change came about, of course, but in the view of most scholars this act, though in some sense successful, since it achieved the purpose both of increasing clerical stipends and of providing a machinery for their continuing adjustment, made the Scottish landed classes so mistrustful and fearful for their property that Charles could never gain their confidence. The comment of Sir James Balfour is always quoted: the act “in effect was the ground stone of all the mischief that followed after.”

Between the 1880s and 1914, British liberalism underwent a significant transformation. During this period, liberalism was redefined by liberal intellectuals so as to be more explicitly an ideology of social reform. At the same time, from 1906-1914 Liberal governments enacted a radically new social welfare policy. Both of these phenomena were the product of a growing awareness on the part of most Liberals that their party was critically dependent upon the votes of working men for electoral success. Following the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 and the launching of Joseph Chamberlain's tariff reform campaign in 1903, the Liberals were faced with an overt challenge from both the left and the right to their claim to be the party of the working man. The articulation of a new liberalism—both as ideology and as policy—was central to the Liberal response to this challenge.

If, however, the Liberal party were to persuade working-class voters that it remained the best political instrument for defending their interests and promoting their needs, the evidence of a transformed liberalism could not be limited to the ideology of intellectuals and the policy of the parliamentary party. The language and behavior of the party activists in the constituencies had to reflect a similar transformation. These were the men who represented liberalism to the local voter. At the same time, these were the men upon whom the national party depended for the unstinting work that was crucial to electoral success. This Liberal rank-and-file was dominated by middle-class Nonconformists. They shared with Liberals a belief in individual liberty and an abhorrence of privilege. Their political agenda—disestablishment of the Anglican church and an end to its privileged position in the education system, temperance reform, the application of Christian principles to foreign policy—reflected these concerns, and after 1886 it increasingly was identified with the policy of the Liberal party. To what degree, then, did the new liberalism affect them?

In a compelling study published in 1973, Warren Hollister and Thomas Keefe argued that the Angevin Empire, “an aggregation of diverse provinces that differed from Henry I's tightly-integrated Anglo-Norman state not merely in size but in fundamental character …, was Henry Plantegenet's own creation, born of his youthful ambition and achieved through his skill and good fortune.” Hollister and Keefe demonstrate conclusively that King Henry I had no such empire in mind when he arranged the marriage of his widowed daughter Matilda to Geoffrey Plantegenet, the fourteen-year-old heir to the counties of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine.

In attempting to ascertain the origins of the Angevin Empire, however, are we limited only to a choice between Henry I's intentions and Henry II's ambition? Might we not ask what Count Fulk the Young, Geoffrey's father, had in mind when he arranged the marriage of his son to the heiress Matilda? John Le Patourel has suggested that Fulk was pursuing the normal Angevin practice of expanding the family's dominions. Le Patourel maintains that “this expansion took a familiar form, the acquisition of rights by marriage, inheritance or in other ways, and their enforcement by war.” For the Angevins the alliance between Geoffrey and Matilda ended a century of warfare between Anjou and Normandy. “Henry I was somewhat furtive over this marriage,” Le Patourel observes, but “in Angers it was a triumph.”

It is widely accepted by scholars that the Hundred Years' War, in general, and the reign of King Edward III of England (1327–1377), in particular, witnessed a crucial stage in the development of state sponsored propaganda efforts to mobilize the nation for war. Edward III's government made particularly skillful use of the church to disseminate the justifications for the king's wars in France and against the Scots. The royal government also used church leaders on a regular and continuing basis to organize a spectrum of religious rites and ceremonies encompassing the largest possible sections of the English population, including the laity and clergy, to seek divine intervention on behalf of English troops serving in the field. These religious rites included prayers, penitential and thanksgiving processions, intercessory masses, vigils, almsgiving, and fasting.