The National Education League came to prominence in the 1870s as the most militant of the pressure groups that spearheaded the so-called “Nonconformist Revolt” from the Liberal Party. The revolt began in 1870, reached its peak in 1873, and contributed to the Liberal defeat in the general election of 1874. It finally petered out in the wake of that defeat and the emergence of a revitalized liberalism during the Eastern Question agitation in the late 1870s. The National Education League was founded in 1869, and disbanded in 1877, in the midst of the Eastern Question agitation. Because its dates are coincident with the revolt, and because it did play a crucial role in that movement, the league's history has been treated as an integral part of the Nonconformist Revolt. The revolt itself has been generally interpreted as a sectionalist attack on the Liberal Party, launched by Nonconformist grievance organizations for narrow, and largely sectarian, aims. According to this view, the revolt ended when the Nonconformists finally accepted the notion of a comprehensive liberalism that transcended their particularist interests; when they recognized that, politically speaking, they were Liberals before they were Nonconformists.

This explanation is misleading because it ignores the generally radical thrust of the Nonconformist Revolt and the agitations of groups such as the United Kingdon Alliance and the Liberation Society. In particular, the rise and fall of the National Education League cannot be understood solely within the context of Nonconformist politics.

The year 1851 witnessed the Great Exhibition, Britain's celebration of technological achievement. Thousands of curious and excited visitors from the world over flocked to Joseph Paxton's futuristic Crystal Palace to marvel at the various exhibits which underscored, not only Britain's commercial and industrial preeminence, but also the Victorian faith in progress and the triumph of the machine.

Less noticed, late that same year, was the passing of one of the most perceptive observers of the new age, the veteran artist J.M.W. Turner. This great English Romantic, famed for his paintings of bucolic landscapes, storms at sea, and Alpine avalanches, also had drawn significant inspiration from the new forces which were then rapidly transforming Britain and the world. A notable body of his work, particularly the efforts of his later career, exist as complex visual commentaries on the reality and the meaning of nineteenth century industrialism. Watercolors of blackened mills, polluted skies, and steam locomotion capture the face of change, while great oils such as The Fighting Temeraire and Snow Storm—Steam–Boat off a Harbour's Mouth symbolize a dynamic new age.

Queen Anne's appointment of Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, as Lord Treasurer in 1702 was a fortunate choice for England. The country faced a war with France occasioned by the empty Spanish throne and the expansionist schemes of Louis XIV. England needed a man of ability in finance, experience in government, and credit with queen and country to handle home affairs and finance the armies of the allies on the continent. The Duke of Marlborough, head of England's armies, considered his friend Godolphin the only man for the task. He even threatened not to command English armies unless Godolphin took the Treasury post. Godolphin had opposed the war with France and had resigned from a Treasury post in 1701 for this reason, but in 1702 he accepted the white staff of Lord Treasurer at the insistence of his friend Marlborough.

During the course of the War Of Spanish Succession Lord Godolphin used his exceptional talents to finance the military forces of England—land and sea—and to provide large amounts of money for the military expenses of England's allies in the conflict. He was successful while Louis XIV's efforts to accomplish the same ends by some of the same means failed.

Godolphin possessed expertise and long experience in national finance, holding responsible Treasury positions in the reigns of Charles II, James II, and William III, before becoming Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer. Recognizing the advantages that the Bank of England could provide for national finance, he had helped push the proposal for its establishment through the House of Lords in the face of strong opposition in 1694. He had also favored a Land Bank that eventually came to naught. Seeing the value of exchequer bills in expanding the nation's money system during William III's reign, he made extensive use of this novel idea in financing Queen Anne's war.

Although significant changes took place in the Church of England between 1547 and 1553, the Protestant Reformation under Edward VI has received less attention from historians than the Reformation under Henry VIII or Elizabeth I. The publication of A. G. Dickens' The English Reformation in 1964 marked the beginning of a redirection of reformation studies which included a deeper appreciation of the importance of the Edwardian Reformation. Dickens saw the English Reformation as part of a larger European religious crisis and focused attention on Lutheran, Calvinistic, and other continental influences that contributed to the development of protestantism under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Emphasizing the successes of Edwardian reformers, Dickens wrote, “Such evidence as we can adduce suggests that Protestantism continued steadily to expand amongst the upper and middle classes, while … able preachers could still make many converts among the working people of the towns.” In recent years, however, regional studies have revealed the obstacles to Protestant reform and the survival of Roman Catholicism.

This essay looks at the Edwardian Reformation from the center of England, the city of London, and examines religious change at the parochial level. It is based on sixty-three clergy who were appointed to a total of sixty-six London benefices between 1547 and 1553 and traces their careers through the reign of Mary to the Elizabethan settlement of 1559. The essay studies the process of parochial reform by examining the exercise of patronage and attempting to determine the quality and religious orientation of beneficed clergy. It also seeks to identify the successes and failures of the government of Edward VI as it sought to promote Protestant reforms throughout the country.

On the afternoon of Thursday, the 10th of June 1540, a squad of Yeoman of the Guard burst into the Council Chamber in Westminster Hall, and arrested Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. They escorted him out through a postern to a boat waiting at Westminster Steps, rowed him down the Thames, and through Traitors' Gate into the Tower of London. Within this gaunt prison Cromwell was held till the early morning of July 28th, when the Yeoman marched him to Tower Hill to be executed for treason, heresy, bribery, and misuse of power. He climbed the scaffold, and addressed the crowd. He had come here to die, he confessed, and not to justify himself. He was a grievous wretch, who sought God's pardon. He had offended the King, and asked the crowd to pray that Henry VIII would forgive him. Finally, Cromwell insisted that he would die a Catholic, and that he had never waivered in a single article of the Catholic faith. Then, after a short prayer commending his soul to the Almighty, Cromwell laid his head on the block, and, as John Foxe records, “patiently suffered the stroke of the axe” swung “by a ragged and butcherly miser [who] very ungodly performed the office.”

So died one of England's greatest statesmen—the architect of the Reformation and the Tudor Revolution in Government. Just as his career has been the source of much historical debate, the events of the last seven weeks of his life, from his arrest to his execution, and his scaffold address especially, have been an irritant of contradiction and confusion.

By 1190, King Richard I of England (1189-1199) had departed for the Third Crusade and had settled on William Longchamp, royal chancellor and bishop of Ely, as the chief justiciar, the king’s regent during the royal absence. But before Richard had even left the European continent, Longchamp’s justiciarship had provoked a powerful reaction from those subjected to it. The hue and cry lifted against the chief justiciar by leaders of the revolt that ousted him included accusations that Longchamp filled England and its offices with “foreigners and unknown men” and that he ruled without the appares, associates whom Richard had included in the regency to assist the chief justiciar. Recent research has shown that the latter charge is patently untrue but the former, utilizing foreigners and others unfamiliar with England and its government, was fundamentally true, at least with regard to justice and the shrievalties. Does Longchamp’s style of management repeat itself with castles and what were the implications for him, the kingdom, and the king? A cursory glance at events during his justiciarship shows that castles played a large role in the narrative, from the massacre of the Jews at York Castle to the arrest of Archbishop Geoffrey at Dover Castle. Though the evidence is of a more tentative nature than that for judicial activity and shrievalties, Longchamp employed in this critical position men close to him, both personal dependents and tested curial servants, a pattern of appointment markedly different from that of the king. Richard I’s practices benefited the baronage, but the chancellor’s determination to bring as many castles as possible under his direct control worked to alienate the chief justiciar from his subjects and disastrously eroded his power base.

There was little reason to have expected Britain's international policies to be of major concern to most voters in casting their ballots in the 1964 General Election. Party disagreement over entering the European Economic Community was at least temporarily in abeyance after de Gaulle's veto. No great imperial question remained to divide Conservatives from the Labour or Liberal Parties. Membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was firmly bipartisan (or tripartisan). Moreover, British power was now so limited, in relation to the rest of the world, as to provide little basis for Englishmen to think that their nation could make important international decisions. At the same time, there were domestic economic problems about which, it was widely thought, a British government could and should do something. In short, every likelihood existed for electoral attention to be fixed almost entirely on domestic affairs. This would hardly have been unusual. Democratic elections ordinarily seem so conducted. Even if it were clearly desirable to have sharp partisan disagreement over a substantive international question, it is doubtful whether genuine alternatives often exist except perhaps for the super-powers.

It is surprising, then, to find that a question of international policy was contested in the British General Election of 1964. The question was whether Britain should continue trying to have an independent nuclear deterrent. Labour (and the Liberals) proposed that the effort be abandoned. The governing Conservative Party was committed to its continuation. These divergent party policies did not, it is true, make the deterrent issue overwhelmingly important in the electoral decision.

The purpose of this paper is to set forth, somewhat arbitrarily, a composite view of the British Labour Party's history between the Wars, to be labelled the orthodox Labour interpretation, and then to set against it a contrasting view which has been expressed by several left-wing writers within the Labour Party. This examination of conflicting opinions can scarcely be dignified with the title historiographical inquiry. In the first place, there are other more or less coherent interpretations of Labour Party history in this period besides the two sketched herein, most notably a Communist view, expressed in such works as Allen Hutt's The Post-War History of the British Working Class. Secondly, as Stephen Graubard has recently said in relation to the Fabian Society, much of the Labour Party history in this period is in fact autobiography. Finally, as will soon become distressingly apparent, the interpretations that most writers have given of Labour between the Wars have been influenced by, connected with, even in some cases identical to the same authors' views on Labour today. History used to be called “past politics”; in this case it cannot entirely escape becoming “present politics.”

According to the orthodox view, the Labour Party was emerging from its infancy in the 1920s, having established its claim to be considered a major contestant for power as recently as 1918. As Francis Williams puts it:

During the later Middle Ages in England both church and state were multiplying their pretensions and powers. The growth of spiritual and temporal administration alike depended upon the availability of bureaucrats willing and able to serve the two powers in the fields of finance, law, administration, and diplomacy. In the absence of cash for paying for services of this kind, popes, prelates, and princes developed means for subsidizing their civil services from sources of revenue to which they were able to invent and enforce claims. This reliance upon the community of the clergy for official service and upon benefices of the church for their maintenance and compensation had the effect of coloring certain ecclesiastical offices down to the Reformation. Prebendal canonries, archdeaconries, and even parish churches came to be viewed more and more as simply sources of emolument — as sinecures to be bestowed upon members of the clergy for the performance of services other than those demanded by the offices given them. For identical reasons English kings, Roman popes, and native prelates laid claim to a variety of ecclesiastical offices and the revenues attached to them in order to obtain the services and skills without which neither church nor state could function effectively in the increasingly complex world of the later Middle Ages. All of this is, of course, well known, and modern scholars have explored rather thoroughly the composition and growth of royal and ecclesiastical administration and the major ways in which each was subsidized.

The canonization of Thomas More in May 1935 was not greeted with universal approbation. According to one writer, the ceremony “was met by an official boycott in the English press and Parliament as well as in the Universities.” Though such a statement is not wholly justified, it must be granted that in a large segment of the British press, coverage of the canonization was minimal and hostile. The hostility was partly inspired by disapproval in some quarters at More's silence over the issue of Henry VIII's ecclesiastical supremacy. On this score there were charges that he was at best an “unsatisfactory saint” or a “negative martyr.” Typical of this attitude was the moderate statement of Ernest Barker a few months after More achieved Sainthood: “More, in the final trial of his faith, was obstinately silent about his real thoughts …. There is something negative in this attitude …. More died for the right of a free conscience — provided it were silent. But is a free conscience which keeps silent really free?”

For some scholars, however, the doubts concerning More's canonization ran deeper than mere disapproval of his silence on the supremacy issue, and centered rather on his alleged mistreatment of heretics (chiefly in the period 1526-34). Certainly the sixteenth-century Reformers regarded More as a persecutor. The Chronicler Edward Hall described him as “a great persecutor of such as detested the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.” Fox in his Book of Martyrs represented him as “blinded in the zeal of popery” to all humane considerations in the treatment of Lutherans.

This article examines Jane Cobden's campaign for the London County Council (L.C.C.) in 1888–89 and its controversial aftermath. Cobden's effort, a pioneering political venture of British feminism, illuminates late-Victorian concepts of gender. It provides at once an anticipation of, and a distinct contrast to, the militant suffragism of the Edwardian era. In addition, it suggests new ways of thinking about the connection between women's-suffragist and labor politics. Perhaps because the campaign was a comparatively obscure incident when measured against the broad sweep of British political history, however, no scholar has done much more than sketch its bare outline. Hopefully, the fuller depiction provided below will accord it the treatment it really deserves.

This article approaches the subject from a tangent, however. Cobden's campaign was a significant if little-known episode not only in the history of British suffragism but also in the life of a man who went on to play a major role in British politics long after the first county council elections had been forgotten. This was George Lansbury, Cobden's political agent during 1888–89 and secretary of the Bow and Bromley Radical and Liberal Federation. Lansbury eventually became one of the main architects of the socialist movement in East London and a chief male supporter of the militant suffragettes during the Edwardian era (in 1912 he temporarily lost his seat in the House of Commons and went to prison on their behalf). He also became a founder and editor of the quintessential “rebel” newspaper, the Daily Herald (which was designated Labour's official organ after Lansbury left it in 1922), a pacifist opponent of World War I, and, from 1931 to 1935, leader of the Labour party itself.

Siam's struggle for survival against imperialism reached its nadir in the crisis of 1893. The beginning of its emergence from danger is generally marked by the Anglo-French guarantee of the integrity of the Menam basin in 1896. A number of questions remain unanswered regarding these critical three years. What was the Siamese role in the precipitation of the crisis and the formulation of the Menam guarantee? Was there a meaningful change in Great Power policy which relieved Siam from its extreme danger and brought it apparent safety? British policy lay very much at the crux of Siam's survival. This study concentrates on the impact of British diplomacy and, particularly, on the conduct of the two principal British Foreign Secretaries, Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery, during the crisis and the creation of the Menam guarantee. British endeavors to limit French expansion at Siam's expense significantly reveal the likenesses and differences between the diplomacy of imperialism of Lord Salisbury's Conservative Governments and the policies of the Liberal regimes of W. E. Gladstone and Rosebery.

Lord Salisbury fretted that the diplomatic need for secrecy regarding his maneuvers to achieve the Menam guarantee deprived him of acclaim for a strategic victory over France. “In Siam,” from 1893 to 1895, he wrote privately, “we found France in full process of absorbing the country.” France had taken much territory by a successful war in 1893, and “Rosebery had been unable to prevent her.” Because Britain had “no treaty rights whatever to interfere in behalf of Siam,” it would have been impossible to have “induced the English nation to go to war” over Siamese affairs.

Much has been written in recent years about the history of childhood in Edwardian Britain. To some extent, that concentration of scholarly effort reflects a profound shift in academic concerns away from the superficially extraordinary and noteworthy to the apparently mundane and neglected that has characterized much of the so-called new social history, and from which redirection of academic attention the history of childhood in modern Britain has been only one of many beneficiaries. But perhaps to a greater extent, the outpourings of recent historiography on the changing nature and changing significance of childhood in Britain during the first decade of the twentieth century and in the years immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Great War reflect an intellectual preoccupation that would have been perfectly comprehensible to the Edwardians themselves: a preoccupation, during the first decade of the twentieth century, with the discovery of “child life,” that is, with a form of mental, emotional, and psychological life peculiar to the child.

Precisely what that life consisted in, how it was discovered, and what, having unearthed it, the Edwardians made of it, is a subject too vast to be explored here. This article draws attention to only one aspect of that life and of the Edwardian discovery of and uses of it that has been largely neglected in modern historical writing. This is the religious life, religious education, and religious development of the child, particularly of that life as it was lived, nurtured, and brought (or not brought) to fruition in the Sunday schools of Edwardian England.

In modern critical imagination, Richard Steele is almost always seen as Joseph Addison's friend and collaborator, as half of the periodical essay-writing team devoted to the promotion of civility, urbanity, and a moral and well-mannered lifestyle. Scholars focus almost exclusively on the Tatler, the Spectator, and Steele's sentimental drama, The Conscious Lovers (1722), virtually ignoring his substantial canon of party journalism and pamphlets. Partly because of Steele's bitter and extensive quarrel with Jonathan Swift—or because most scholars assume that Swift got the best of him—he is now rarely taken seriously as a political player in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. This essay focuses on Steele the party writer—and especially on his attitude toward religio-political authority and the sanctity of vox populi. Though Steele is now described as (like Addison) “not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics,” he was for excellent reasons regarded by contemporaries as a writer not only trying to politicize the people but actually succeeding in doing so. This essay attempts to recontextualize Steele's polemical contributions; he has been read alongside Addison and other Whig wits, but he rarely figures in discussions of the history of political ideas in early eighteenth-century England, in discussions of debates about authority, resistance, and the nature of obligation, about public religion and liberty of conscience, the political implications of heterodoxy, and the use of reason as a challenge to dogmatic clerical authority.

In October 1934, a Croatian terrorist organization assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia in the streets of Marseilles, France. His murder caused an international crisis because of the safe haven given to the group by the Italian and Hungarian governments. The assassination led the world's first peacekeeping body, the League of Nations, to intervene and to propose a legal solution for the political crisis. In November 1937, the league completed two antiterrorism treaties. Only the British colonial government of India ratified the terrorism convention, which was, by contrast, rejected by the United Kingdom on legal and political grounds. This article examines the European origins of the League of Nation's consideration of international terrorism and the divisions that occurred between Delhi and London over supporting the antiterrorism measure. Delhi's separate membership in the League of Nations allowed the colonial government to deviate from London and to sign a treaty deemed necessary for domestic security.

In the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.