On June 4, 1610, in an unusual joint session of Parliament, Henry, eldest son of James I, was created Prince of Wales. The King and lords, magnificent in medieval splendor, gathered in the ancient room of old Westminster Palace, known as the White Hall. The Lords' chamber, used at other times, would not suffice; for on this occasion, the commons, instead of standing crowded behind the bar, as they did at the opening and closing of Parliament, sat in seats especially provided, their Speaker and clerk with them. Observers noted that burgesses, fine in gold lace and velvet, were no less splendid than the lords. Special guests, noblemen's little sons, ambassadors who had jockeyed for the most honorable places, the Princess Elizabeth, and Charles, Duke of York, also gathered to honor the occasion — one of the great moments in James's reign. For all the King's shortcomings, already apparent, he brought one gift to the English people, which a far greater monarch, Elizabeth, had never bestowed: a safe succession, the Prince who would secure their realm from civil strife.

It was altogether fitting, the Earl of Salisbury had explained to the commons, that the Prince should be created in Parliament. So the most fortunate of medieval princes had been proclaimed. Others came to an evil end. Alas for these joyous predictions. Salisbury's own death in April 1612 saved him from the bitter knowledge that Henry would die a few months later in November, to be succeeded as heir by his younger brother, Charles.

Evangelicals and Evangelicalism seem unable to remain for long either in or out of favor. The line of periodic assessments which began by moving upward from the tart jibes of Sydney Smith to James Stephen's measured rehabilitation, took a plunge with the Hammond's indignant assault, and has continued to trace lesser fluctuations for the past thirty years. E. M. Howse, in Saints in Politics, attacked the Hammonds for lack of balance and attempted a rehabilitation. In the process, however, he lost his own balance and fell over backwards. Now Ford K. Brown's Fathers of the Victorians implies that one can again disparage the Evangelicals. Their legacy to the century, Brown suggests, was a negative and stifling one.

This matter of the legacy makes the question of interpretation and reinterpretation important. Historians of nineteenth-century England agree that Evangelicalism contributed much to the temper of the age. Yet there agreement ceases. Brown, for example, thinks that the legacy, never a rich one, was ill-spent by the likes of Charlotte Brönte's sour-souled Mr. Brocklehurst. Noel Annan, rather, finds it husbanded and flourishing in the sensitive conscience of Leslie Stephen. Both may be right. If so, merely further proof of the strength and complexity of the Evangelical inheritance; further indication, therefore, of the need for its careful examination.

The legacy cannot be examined apart from its source: the Evangelical faith itself. Without an understanding of that faith, one cannot know that while Zachary Macaulay was an Evangelical, Granville Sharp was not; without that understanding the true difference between the Evangelical morality of Henry Thornton and the humanitarian morality of Henry Brougham will go undetected.

In the midst of the political controversies of the early twentieth century, Lord Willoughby de Broke, a landed aristocrat with little parliamentary experience, emerged as a major political figure. An ally of the Chamberlains, Lord Milner, Sir Edward Carson, and Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review, he became a significant spokesman for extreme conservatism. During the Parliament Bill struggle, the battle over the Conservative leadership in the fall of 1911, and the Home Rule crisis, Willoughby de Broke organized the efforts of peers and other Conservatives radically dissatisfied with the direction of British politics. Since 1914 Willoughby de Broke has become a symbol of reaction and traditionalist resistance to change: the fox-hunting nobleman “whose face,” in Dangerfield's wellknown description, “bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse,” and who “was not more than two hundred years behind his time.” Such an analysis, however, is more amusing than accurate. In fact, while Willoughby de Broke's objectives were basically those of a traditional landed aristrocrat, his methods and emphases strongly prefigured those of later rightist politicians, both British and continental: tactics of political democracy could be mastered in order to preserve the status quo.

Although Willoughby de Broke often fondly recalled the patriarchical society he had known in his childhood on a great estate, he did not merely attempt to recreate the past. He and his political associates, for all their commitment to conservatism, understood that important adaptations would have to be made to new conditions.

In August 1865, Liverpool's Catholic Bishop (1856–72), Alexander Goss, needed to find a priest. The bishop knew that Father Hardman of Birchley had grown too old to minister to a mission that was rapidly expanding because of Irish migration into the region. As he considered a replacement for Hardman, Goss made two specifications. First, the bishop sought to replace Hardman with a younger priest who could handle a growing congregation. Second, Goss intended to find an English priest to satisfy the local English Catholic baronet, Sir Robert Gerard. In a letter to Gerard, Goss lamented that “I have had some difficulty in making arrangements to fill his place; for being myself a Lancashireman I can well understand your dislike to have one from a country [Ireland] where nationality seems to override every other feeling.” Despite the region's expanding Irish population, the bishop sought to satisfy Gerard by recruiting an English priest. To Goss's frustration, however, most of the available priests were Irish.

Goss's comments illuminate the nineteenth-century English Catholic's prevalent concern: that Irish nationalism would supersede Catholicism in the hearts and minds of England's Catholic population, which was predominantly composed of working-class Irish migrants. The bishop knew that most Irish Catholics equated their Catholicism with Irish nationalism, while English Catholics like Gerard considered themselves a refined Catholic minority in a vulgar Protestant land. Goss struggled to bridge the ideological differences between English and Irish Catholics in Liverpool. He sought to accommodate working-class Irish migrants while appeasing English Catholic gentry like Gerard who supplied important money and respectability to the Catholic Church.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a widespread effort to reassess Victorian values so that they might be retained, but in a more viable form. The new democracy was the catalyst in this introspective process which affected political thought most of all. Before the Great War the anomalous behavior of the new citizen, in the streets and at the polls, compelled thoughtful attention to political problems in England. In reaction to the unreasonable and unpredictable behavior of the new democracy, a new democratic liberalism and a new elitism came into being. New liberalism, in trying to qualify rationalist assumptions and transform the negative program of nineteenth-century liberalism, largely succeeded. New elitism, like old elitism, in concluding that the great majority were fit only to be governed, largely failed. But the elitist critique of mass urban democracy was as compelling to many people as the new liberal's defense. While liberalism has received critical comment, discussions of elitism have been limited to Fabian methodology or subordinated to analyses of Utopian programs. Yet the most formidable elitist argument came from the infant science of social psychology, developed concurrently by William McDougall, a physiologist, and Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon and neurologist. In prewar Britain, social psychology was the basis for a political critique of democracy presented as a scientific analysis of behavior.

This paper deals with the validity of social psychology as a reading of history which concluded in political elitism. The accuracy and significance of the social psychologists' explanation of behavior are assessed solely in terms of its political implications as a plea for government by an Elect of social scientists, a plea hidden within a purportedly scientific account of social evolution.

Among the accomplished humanists who flourished in the court of Henry VIII, there were a number devoted to the promotion of the “New Faith,” which, with its emphasis on classical learning and rereading of the church fathers, also called into question certain theological truths of Rome as well as the authority of the pope. The most immediate and effective means for this promotion were the various types of patronage readily available to holders of government and household office, both high and low. There is a certain irony here as Henry had, after his split with Rome, declared that there would be no doctrinal innovation, simply that the head of the English church would be the English king rather than the pope at Rome. Yet members of his own court whose actions should have supported and carried out his expressed intentions were those who advanced the very doctrinal innovations he professed to deplore. The reason for this incongruity may be found at least in part in the actions of the king rather than in his words, as he did not develop and follow through with any consistent religious program. As a result, the signals sent to court members were at best mixed and open to individual interpretation. A remarkable latitude in personal policies resulted as members of both Protestant and Catholic factions jockeyed for power. Conservatives, believing they supported the royal wishes, opposed vigorously any further innovation in religious affairs. On the other hand, courtiers who were theologically curious quite easily could believe that, in patronizing sometimes extreme reformers, they were merely carrying out Henry's real but not clearly stated intentions.

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.

The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.

Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.

Between 1841 and 1904, fourteen of Sir Christopher Wren's City of London churches, accounting for over a third of the City's forty Wrens, were demolished. But for certain deficiencies in the legislation enabling City church demolition, the toll would have been much higher. At one point during the late 1860s, well over half of all City churches had been selected for demolition. City church demolition was the most focused and yet also the most sustained episode of Victorian “vandalism,” and it therefore offers a uniquely appropriate case study through which to draw larger conclusions about late Victorian attitudes to the relative merits of historic preservation and development. The debates surrounding the demolition of Wren's City churches suggest that many advocates of historic building demolition were not, as William Morris would have us believe, “utilitarian philistines.” Nor, for that matter, were all preservationists motivated by heritage concerns.

Many historians of plebeian marriage have accepted David Kent's findings that married men in eighteenth-century London enlisted to desert their wives. This article argues that this was far from always the case. Enlistment could serve as a family survival strategy for pauper husbands, particularly during mobilization periods. Bounties, shorter terms of service, and pensions could entice responsible providers. The militia or guards regiments appealed to family men because of their stable income and low risk of foreign deployment. Accounts of agonized quayside partings indicate that some married recruits who left British soil had expected the army to allow their wives to accompany them. Kent considered every army wife who sought parish relief as abandoned, yet resort to the parish might form part of a complex family survival strategy that included wives’ begging and soldiers’ taking on extra work and sending home their pay. Some men used military service as a way to fulfill husbandly duties, not to avoid them.

This article considers the opportunities available to, and the constraints to be negotiated by, female litigants at the court of Star Chamber during the reigns of the early Tudor kings. Star Chamber was a prerogative court and grew in popularity following the transformation and clarification of its judicial functions under Thomas Wolsey in the early sixteenth century. While it has suffered losses to its records, around five thousand cases still survive from the early Tudor period, including nearly one thousand cases involving female litigants. Unlike those in other Westminster courts, such as Common Pleas, Chancery, or the Court of Requests, Star Chamber cases have yet to be fully examined for what they can tell us about women's access to justice and their experience of legal process. This article begins by surveying the number of cases involving female litigants, showing that far more women came to the court as plaintiffs than as defendants. The numbers were significant—in line with Chancery—but still show women as a minority. Drawing on a wide range of examples, the paper explores the major factors determining, and limiting, women's active roles as litigants, taking into consideration cultural expectations, legal practice (including the operation of coverture), and, where detected, individual decision-making.

In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin's tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin's response is also included.

The regal union (and James VI and I's desire that it be perfected) produced varied responses to Scotland, not just hostile reactions. Plays, pamphlets, treatises, and manuscripts accompanied parliamentary debate in England and queried the precedents for, as well as the future potential of, something called Britain. They also engaged with the nature of sovereignty. Authors thus deployed both negative and positive descriptions of the Scots, and they were unified less by Scotophobia and more by a tendency to privilege a distinctly English narrative despite a specifically British problem. Such Anglocentric narratives circumvented the issue of the Anglo-Scottish relationship, postponing English engagement with the realities of their new context. This was possible only because the Scots occupied a position somewhere between sameness and difference in the English imagination.

This article examines how the East India Company's 1856 annexation of the Indian Kingdom of Awadh informed British Conservative responses to the Indian Revolt in 1857 and 1858. Addressing scholarship on Britain's reaction to the revolt and political engagement with Indian empire, this study reveals that Conservatives interpreted this event with a veneration for locality and prescription. Criticism from company officials and Awadh's deposed royal family informed Conservative perceptions that British exploitation and westernization were responsible for military rebellion and popular upheaval. Principally, this reflected Conservative skepticism regarding liberal modernity as well as support for prescribed aristocratic, propertied, and established church interests in Britain. Their response, expressed in Parliament and supported in conservative periodicals, was the 1858 Queen's Proclamation authored by Edward Smith-Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby's Conservative government. The proclamation established a lasting imperial framework which defined the crown's obligation to uphold India's political, social, and cultural differences and separation from Britain. Future Conservatives strengthened British views of India's distinctiveness by supporting perceived traditional leaders and customs over uniform western administration and education.

Although Richard II's Irish expedition of 1394–95 has attracted considerable scholarly attention, the focus has largely been on Richard's relations with the colonial administration in Ireland, pointing mainly to the colonial government's plea for greater royal investment in the colony as the main factor underpinning Richard's decision to intervene in Ireland. Little attention, by comparison, has been devoted to exploring the king's relations with both the Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scottish nobility. Using Richard's relations with the expanding Gaelic world as the main case study, this article reconsiders how developments in the Gaelic west influenced the king's decision to intervene in Ireland. Set against the backdrop of Anglo-Scottish relations and the Hundred Years’ War, the article draws on a broad range of Gaelic sources from Ireland and Scotland, English and Scottish governmental records, and material from the Avignon papacy. It uncovers and traces the development of the main Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scottish dynasties during the late fourteenth century, their relationships with one another, and their unfolding connections with the English and Scottish crowns. By locating Richard's expeditions within the broader archipelagic context, this article argues that the wider Gaelic world, though on the geographic periphery of Ireland and Scotland, was capable of exerting a far greater degree of influence on the course of “British” politics than has previously been acknowledged.

William Pitt had no desire for a war with France in 1793. While the French had lurched from bankruptcy to revolution to war, he had kept England at peace for a decade and successfully repaired the damage done to government finance by the American War. Such had been Pitt's intention from the start, according to his Cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, who later wrote that “his views and measures…were in the outset purely oeconomical and pacific. It was his first ambition to restore by moderate and peaceful councils the strength and confidence of his country….” He had no desire to risk either the financial or political equilibrium he had achieved.