Lollardy, the native English heresy vigorously suppressed since the early fifteenth-century, did not die with its suppression in the wake of the rebellion of Sir John Oldcastle in 1414. A century later Lollard beliefs remained current, albeit in varied forms. The most consistent features in this eclectic religious system were the possession and reading of English translations of the Scriptures, a sacramentarian view of the Eucharist, and an often vehement anticlericalism. With few exceptions Lollardy was the preserve of the unlearned; based on the religious fringes of towns and the greater cities, rather than in the learned centers of the universities or the Court.

This article investigates the influence of the Maynooth and Repeal crises on Conservative politicians after 1846 and the putative maintenance of their identity as defenders of the Church after the Disruption of the party. Historians of the Conservative party have long realized that it suffered from a crisis of identity for a long time after 1846. Some of the leading Peelites were heading more and more towards the Liberal party, and most backbench Peelites gradually joined the Protectionist party; but the Protectionists did not have enough experienced leaders to qualify for the inheritance. Norman Gash has argued that “the Protectionists were not a political party in the sense of one able to provide and sustain a Government in the circumstances of the mid-nineteenth century…. The weakness of the Protectionists was not merely that after 1846 they represented the Conservative party with most of the brains knocked out, but that until they could shake off the monolithic character implied by their title, they could scarcely hope to become a national party or form a viable Government.” Likewise Robert Stewart and John Ramsden consider that the Protectionists were unable to take the place of the Conservative party, given their lack of effective and experienced leaders. It is undeniable that the Protectionist party was not as strong as the Conservative party had been in terms of executive capacity or party organization. But to say also that it was unable to inherit the mantle of Conservatism is to fall into the same trap as Gash and to exaggerate the importance of Peelite executive ability. More significant is the fact that the party of Stanley and Disraeli maintained fidelity to the core principles of the Conservative party—i. e. the constitution of Church and State, and the principle of protectionism. In this sense, the Protectionist party did become the sole inheritor of the Conservative party during the later 1840s.

Over the past fifteen years historians of Britain have debated the degree to which the nation's aristocracy was open to newcomers. First, W. D. Rubinstein suggested that the new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the established aristocracy had assumed a more “caste-like” mentality that held outsiders at bay. Then in 1984 two important works extended the challenge to earlier centuries. John Cannon demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts. More significantly, Lawrence and Jeanne Stone completed an immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of newcomers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites.

Other leading students of the British aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken exception to the claims of these iconoclasts. Sir John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that “there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite….” In greater detail F. M. L. Thompson called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made substantial land purchases.

Despite the initial welcome extended to him, Charles II returned to the English throne in 1660 accompanied by skepticism and even hostility from substantial numbers of his subjects. In the years immediately following the Restoration, the king, his government and the landed order, all uncertain of the extent of their power, strove together to define, reassert, and make it permanent. This was no easy task, in part because the messages of the Restoration were confusing. One was conciliatory, acknowledging that the events of the 1640s and 1650s could not be undone and had to be accommodated in some manner by the new regime. Legal proceedings under the republic were confirmed, passage of the Act of Indemnity signalled the eschewal of systematic revenge, and the retention of Interregnum officials, especially in local administration, deprived triumphant Anglican royalists of the monopoly of power and office for which they had hoped. The other message was conveyed in harsher terms. In many places and from many institutions, adherents of the revolutionary regime did lose their positions, while followers of recently-respectable creeds were now cast as enemies of the state and good order. The new monarchical order held no brief for republicans, and many dissenters of no very radical stripe were quickly placed beyond an official pale because they could not accept a prayer-book order in the church. In the early years of the Restoration, then, policies of accommodation coexisted with those of repression, and we may well ask how in these circumstances an enduring regime was reconstructed.

In January 1773, Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the colonies, received a letter urging him to appoint no more Scots or Irishmen to offices in America. While the author claimed that, as a “Cosmopolite” he had no vulgar “national Prejudices,” he declared that “the English, particularly the Americans,” had conceived such Prejudices against the Scots and Irish, that it is great Impolicy to nominate them for governors or for any Employ in America….” One cannot know exactly what public relations disasters might have inspired this strong advice. Nevertheless, recent changes in both the United Kingdom and the empire at large had clearly heightened age-old English prejudices against these “alien” groups. Never before had so many Scots and Irishmen held public office in Britain and its colonies, and Scottish merchants were making considerable inroads in imperial trade at the expense of their English counterparts. However, jealousy on account of this new-found power does not completely explain the widespread animus against these groups. Many Englishmen and Anglo-Americans also perceived that Scots and Irishmen approached imperial government in ways that threatened English liberty. While it would be going too far to accept the contemporary English notion that Scots, and indeed most non-Englishmen, were “tinctured with notions of despotism,” this stereotype points toward the reality that officials from the fringes of the British Isles took a new approach to imperial government: they emphasized metropolitan authority while, at the same time, regarding the Crown's diverse subjects from a cosmopolitan perspective.

Raoul Glaber, the Burgundian monk and chronicler, noted in a famous passage in his Historiarum Libri Quinque how, about the year 1000,

Although Glaber was writing primarily of the Continent, the tide of religious revival that followed the coming of the millennium eventually lapped upon the shores of the most distant corners of Europe. In Scotland, the great age of church-building came a century later, and it was the twelfth century, rather than the eleventh, which was notable for the foundation of churches and monasteries on a large scale. Nevertheless, by 1200 Scotland, too, had been cloaked in a white mantle of new churches, made up of cathedrals, parish churches, and monasteries. It is the latter with which this essay will be principally concerned.

The works of Professor Barrow are of the first importance for understanding the patterns of monastic patronage that brought the Benedictines, Cistercians, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, and other religious orders to Scottish soil, and for the contribution these orders made to the medieval kingdom of Scotland.

The background of Christian thanksgiving in prayer and liturgy is in the Jewish berakah, a term which refers to thank-offerings made prior to meals, at the annual harvests or in-gatherings, and upon such special occasions as a military success against the Philistines. David's song of deliverance in 2 Samuel 22 is an exmple of the latter, and numerous examples of other subjects of thanksgiving are recorded in the Psalms. Psalms 66, for example, represents the sort of thanksgiving offered at the annual “Feast of Weeks” or “Feast of Ingathering” (specifically of grain), the Jewish harvest celebration of Pentecost (see also Exodus 34:22). The New Testament records several occasions upon which Jesus celebrated the berakah at meals, the most notable being at the feeding of the multitude in Matthew 15:36 and at the Last Supper (Luke 22:17); and on his way to Rome Paul offers thanks at the breaking of bread during a storm at sea (Acts 27:35). In the Greek of the New Testament the berakah is translated as eucharistia (“thanksgiving”), and it is the Eucharist that becomes the central rite of Christian worship. In his “Treatise on Good Works” Martin Luther observes that “praise and thanksgiving will follow with a pure heart, from which the mass is called eucharistia in Greek, that is, thanksgiving.” Friedrich Heiler affirms that “The Thanksgiving Prayer in public worship, the direct expression of the living consciousness of salvation, is always a calling to mind of the history of redemption.” In effect, the Jewish offering of thanks for deliverance from generally immediate, tangible enemies (the Philistines, the Moabites, unfavorable crop conditions) becomes the Christian offering of thanks for deliverance from sin and death through the redemption of Christ. The sacrificial lamb of the Old Testament becomes Christ the lamb in the New Testament, and for the Christian “the Eucharistic action is first and foremost a sacrifice of thanksgiving.” Any study of Christian thanksgivings, however, will demonstrate that the occasional and specific nature of the Jewish thank-offering remains in Christian practice.

The investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales was a magnificently staged pageant, as most of the 500 million people who saw it on television will attest. Two hundred thousand pounds went into the making of the extravaganza of July 1, 1969, an event that Queen Elizabeth had promised to her Welsh subjects as far back as 1958, at the close of the Commonwealth Games at Cardiff. But no date had been set for the Caernarvon investiture until July 1, 1967. Predictably, the timing of that announcement has been seen as politically motivated, as a direct response to the emergence of Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) as a threat in two recent by-elections in Wales.

The investiture ceremony was itself a matter of much contention within Wales. Most Welshmen, to the distaste, even disgust, of the minority separatists, welcomed the event: as a royal occasion, a boost to tourism, and as a state celebration in which they, as Welshmen, were to take pride of place. It was to cost too much, true, but then the Welsh are not alone in questioning the cost of maintaining Royalty. And it is true that Charles was an English prince, but he had behaved himself admirably while a student at University College, Aberystwyth, and had even learned some Welsh during his stay in the Principality. He was, in that respect, the first “English” prince of Wales to identify himself with the Welsh in so intimate and endearing a way. Some memories on that July day, 1969, were directed to the first “English” Prince of Wales, a baby son of Edward I who was born at Caernarvon in 1301 and presented to the Welsh as their prince to replace the defeated Llywelyn. Edward II, it turns out, not only grew up to speak no Welsh, but used French more than English as his own language. It is from this precedent that English monarchs have, ever since, named their first-born son and heir Prince of Wales (it is not itself strictly a hereditary title in the sense of being passed from the Prince to his first-born, but reverts to the crown in the event of the Prince's death; nor has there ever been a Princess of Wales).

Recent years have seen growing interest both in the influence of the British Empire on metropolitan culture—what John M. MacKenzie described as “the centripetal effects of Empire”—and in the relationships between gender and imperialism. Early studies of European women and imperialism described the activities of women as “memsahibs,” travellers and colonists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, challenged the notion that “women lost us the Empire,” and began to analyze the roles of white women in the “man’s world” of imperial rule. More recently attention has been drawn by Vron Ware, Barbara Ramusack and Antoinette Burton to the complex relationships between British and colonized women and, by Burton especially, to the ambiguities of “imperial feminism.” Nevertheless, apart from the well-documented female emigration societies, and the isolated study of Flora Shaw, colonial editor of The Times, by Helen Callaway and Dorothy O. Helly, the considerable activities of women as imperial propagandists have received little attention. This article traces the imperial activism of Violet Markham, the daughter of a Northern industrialist and sister of a Liberal M.P. who, roused from the aimless existence of Victorian young ladyhood by the Boer War, spent much of the Edwardian era promoting the cause of the British Empire. Through a study of her imperial career it explores the options available to an imperialist woman in an era when women were barred from formal politics, and when imperial politics in particular were considered a “masculine” preserve, and considers the obstacles—practical, ideological and psychological—which confronted her.

The accession of William III began a revolution in English foreign policy. Under the Dutch king's auspices England joined a Grand Alliance against the France of Louis XIV and shouldered the burdens of a principal partner in a major continental war. Not only did the war place grave financial strains upon the state; the formulation, administration, and execution of war policy also became areas of continual concern. These concerns combined to raise general questions about England's proper role in European affairs and about the proper application of English power in service of those interests. They also cast William III and the politicians into a constitutional no-man's land in which the royal monopoly over war and peace had to contest with the need to secure annual supplies. It has been the historian's task to explain how William III's “continental commitment” to land warfare, alliances, and defense of European liberties survived this political struggle.