In a recent article, Caroline M. Hibbard noted that recent work on Tudor-Stuart recusancy has focused on the enforcement of royal and statutory policy on the local level and has examined the social composition of the recusant community. These studies have revealed that the recusant community was not dominated by priests, not subject to the political directives of the papacy, and not plotting rebellion. The problem inherent in these local studies, as Professor Hibbard points out, is that they do not explain why the English were anti-Catholic and they do not examine the international character of the English Catholic Community. This article is an attempt to view the recusant problem from the perspective of the monarch and the privy council, because both monarch and privy council were aware of the international character of Catholicism and both stated clearly in their policies toward recusants the grounds of their objection to the Catholic community. An analysis of the recusancy policy established by Elizabeth between 1559 and 1574 reveals that her primary objection to the recusants was not religious but political. The recusants denied a fundamental claim of the monarch: the headship of the church and, therefore, the claim that the monarch was the source of all power within the realm. This article, then, will examine the ways in which she wished to contain a minority who denied her supreme power in the realm and the circumstances which caused the queen and the council to change that policy.

While the English Glorious Revolution has been the subject of considerable investigation, the Scottish phase of this vital conflict has been virtually ignored. The purpose of this paper is to look briefly at the degree of Scottish participation in the revolutionary events of 1688. It is not my intention to investigate either the underlying or the immediate reasons for the ousting of James VII & II from the thrones of Scotland and England, for that would necessitate a a detailed consideration of James's policy of political and religious despotism.

It would be a very rash judgment to charge any single person or event with catapulting the Scottish nation into revolution. Yet, if ever one person came close to individually fomenting a revolution, that person was James VII of the ill-fated house of Stuart. In Scotland James's attempts to cajole, bribe, or threaten influential men into lending their support to Roman Catholic relief was without success. His personal policy of religious oppression and arbitrary rule progressively alienated politically important segments of his Protestant kingdom so that by 1688, despite their differences and personal rivalries, they coalesced to a degree that left the king virtually isolated in Scotland. The failure of James's policies had created a situation ripe for revolution. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of any readiness on the part of the Scots to initiate such a revolt. However much one might wish to be able to point to the catalyst of revolution in Scotland, one is still left with the hard fact that from June to October 1688, while Englishmen plotted their revolution and William of Orange prepared his invasion, Scotsmen remained loyal to their native king, and Scottish royal administration continued its rule virtually unchallenged by dissenters. James's rule may have been detested by the majority of Scotsmen, but Scotland was too weak a nation to unilaterally overthrow a monarch who also commanded the superior strength and resources of England. Scottish hesitancy to precipitate a revolution persisted despite the fact that the birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688 seemed to assure the permanence of the hated Catholic regime.

It has long been an established part of the Cromwellian legend that some time during the 1630's Oliver Cromwell made the decision to abandon England in favor of a fresh start in the New World but was prevented from doing so by the government of Charles I. There is evidence that among the Puritan leaders he was not alone in this resolve. What were the motives that led such men to consider leaving England? How serious were they? Why were their plans not carried out? This essay will examine the case of Sir Arthur Hesilrige about whom sufficient evidence exists to allow us to supply the answers to some basic questions about the Puritan leaders' intended emigration to New England.

Sir Arthur Hesilrige, the second son of Sir Thomas Hesilrige, baronet of Nosely, was born in 1601. His family, an ancient and prosperous member of the landed gentry, possessed the manor of Nosely in Leicestershire and had extensive holdings and connections in Northumberland, the county of their origin. Little is known of his early life. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and at Gray's Inn where he may well have met several future parliamentarians and Cromwellians with whom he was later to associate. In 1624 upon completion of his education he married Frances Elmes, the daughter of Thomas Elmes, a Northhampshire gentleman. Six years later in January, 1630, upon his father's death, Arthur succeeded to the baronetcy and the estates, his elder brother having preceded his father in death.

In nineteenth century Britain, many evangelicals looked upon the Catholic Church as the incarnation of Antichrist. Their particular interpretation of the Protestant Bible, and especially the Book of Revelation, made it important for them to fight the enemy of true religion. During the 1850s and 1860s the most significant example of this struggle was the campaign to abolish state funding of the Catholic seminary at Maynooth in Ireland, a subsidy which parliament had approved in 1845 over the protests of a national anti-Maynooth crusade. It is the crisis of 1845 upon which historians have concentrated their studies. The furor over the endowment of Maynooth subsided, but when the Papal Aggression affair of 1850–51 stimulated “No Popery” sentiment, the ultra-Protestants of Britain revived their agitation against Maynooth. The impelling force behind this renewed campaign was principally doctrinal, based on a view of Biblical truth which cast the Catholic Church in the role of Antichrist and made Maynooth appear to be the center of rebellion, disloyalty, and immorality for all of Ireland. One scholar has written that the Antichrist idea intensified feelings of anti-Catholicism and influenced parliament as late as 1851. This essay will demonstrate that the utilization of the Antichrist motif, when combined with several other negative notions about the Catholic Church, helped produce and sustain a revival of anti-Catholicism in the form of the campaign against Maynooth, well beyond the events of 1851.

In 1862 Mary O'Bryan Thorne, daughter of the founder of the Bible Christian Connexion and a Bible Christian local preacher, wrote in her diary: “At our East Street anniversary I spoke at 11, and Serena [her daughter] at 2:30 and 6; one was converted in the evening.” She regarded this as a routine engagement; something she had been doing since her sixteenth year, and that her daughter had every right to continue. Female traveling preachers (itinerants) were important, perhaps crucial, in establishing the Bible Christians as a separate denomination and their use was never formally abandoned. The persistence of this tradition makes their history an important case study of women preachers’ experience in nineteenth-century Britain, showing a trend toward marginalization similar to the experience of many other nineteenth-century women who sought to enter increasingly professionalized occupations open only to men. Even in the early years of the Connexion when the organizational structure was fluid and evolving, women were never on an equal footing with male preachers. With the development of a formal organization in the 1830s their numbers started to drop and the gap between male and female responsibilities widened, with women never assigned the full duties of male ministry.

In June 1914 David Lloyd George, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, capitulated to opposition from within his own party and withdrew from the Budget for 1914–15 his proposals to revise the system of Exchequer grants to local authorities and to establish land value rating. Withdrawal was a considerable political humiliation for Lloyd George. “His stock stands low in the party,” commented his friend, Lord Riddell, in his diary. “The Budget has been a fiasco.” What went wrong with the 1914 Budget is the concern of this article.

Lloyd George's 1914 Budget incorporated two distinct strategies. The first comprised a fiscal strategy designed to provide in a single “taxing” Budget for the needs of both the Navy and the reorganization of local government finance and taxation. The second constituted part of a wider political strategy intended to furnish a reform program that would enable the Liberals to make a powerful progressive appeal at the next general election, due by the end of 1915. The first was supposed to serve the second, but in the event had the opposite result. It prompted Lloyd George to abandon his original plan of building up to a major reform Budget in 1915 and to proceed instead to include in the 1914 Budget “provisional” grants to local authorities before he had prepared the groundwork, administratively, legislatively or politically, for a new system of grants and rating. At all levels, the enterprise was premature, and simply presented a group of discontented wealthy Liberals in the Commons with the opportunity to stage an effective protest against the direction of Liberal finance.

In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was perhaps to be expected that the main theme in literature among younger writers and poets particularly would be the social, political, and economic malaise of the time. Indeed, it was the delineation and analysis of this malaise and its relationship to individual life that set the tone of the so-called thirties poetry in Britain and which provided the focal point of W. H. Auden, the most distinguished and versatile English poet of the 1930's. Auden's work in the thirties was characterized by persistent intellectual effort and endurance. For as his contemporary John Lehmann pointed out, W. H. Auden was “the spiritual physician of his generation.” And he was the spiritual physician because more than any other prestigious English litterateur of the interwar years, Auden sought to resolve what seemed to be the most critical problem of the time: how the individual might take effective political action without losing his moral integrity. Or as Auden put the problem as early as 1930:

I should like, therefore, to examine two of W. H. Auden's works which most directly confront the problem of individual commitment to collective political action: “Spain,” and Journey to a War.

The famous poem “Spain,” written in April 1937 and published in May of that year, seemed to announce that at last Auden offered unequivocal endorsement of politicial action. The poem further develops a theme set forth in his celebrated Look Stranger (1935) — the moral responsibility of carefully considered choice and action. The Spanish Civil War, to Auden, is the clear opportunity of an individual to make a decision and to act. A person could either do nothing, which in the face of the Fascist threat is virtually to commit moral suicide, or he could act in unison with other individuals against Fascism. In Auden's view, not only does the Spanish Civil War represent a crisis situation in the history of his generation, it represents also a pivotal point in the intellectual history of the Western World. Accordingly Auden places himself and his generation in a profoundly meaningful historical context. The first stanzas of the poem summarize the ingredients of the Weltanschauung which culminated in twentieth-century liberalism, with its political manifestation in Western parliamentary democracy. The poet also sketches the history of the application of science to conquer the natural world and the gradual victory of scientific method over the ages in which religious faith explained the whole of the world as but a symbol of a transcendental order.

Considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the origins of political parties in England during the reign of King Charles II. Yet the fact that a prominent courtier and member of the king's own family, Prince Rupert, was also a leader of the opposition or “country” party has frequently been overlooked by historians. J. R. Jones, for example, in The First Whigs, fails to mention the prince, and even Rupert's biographer, Eliot Warburton, has dismissed the last decade in his subject's life by saying that, after 1673, the ailing prince was too ill to play a role in English government.

But Prince Rupert was, in fact, very active politically in the two decades following the Restoration. He sat in the House of Lords as duke of Cumberland and served on parliamentary committees. He had a seat on the Privy Council and was a member of all four of its standing committees. Rupert was often selected to serve the crown: as special emissary to his friend, Emperor Leopold I, in 1661 with the task of preventing an Anglo-imperial rupture over the marriage of King Charles to a Portuguese princess; as England's representative in negotiations with Denmark in 1669 and Brandenburg in 1670; as joint admiral of the fleet during the second Anglo-Dutch War, and de facto commander of the fleet during the third conflict with the United Provinces. Although the prince became openly critical of the royal government as early as 1667 and, by 1673, had allied with Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury, to form an opposition group, the future country or Whig party, he also retained many ties with the court.

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.

The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.

Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

The Restoration period has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years, with the result that many of our commonly held assumptions about politics in the reign of Charles II have come under increased critical scrutiny. Nowhere is this more true than for the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent Tory Reaction. For a long time we thought we had the dynamics of this period worked out: the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two parties—the Whigs and Tories—with the Whigs being the anti-Catholic, exclusionist, and Parliamentarian party, who carried with them the support of the people out-of-doors, and the Tories being the party of divine-right, absolute monarchy, anti-populist in their outlook, putting their belief in the sanctity of the hereditary principle before the interests of the people. The Whig challenge was essentially defeated with the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, and thereafter the 1680s saw a drift towards monarchical absolutism, until this trend was defeated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.

In the annals of nineteenth-century Ireland, few disputes between public figures have been more rancorous or more significant than the fight that began in 1848 between two seemingly like-minded journalists, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel. In the mid-1840s, Duffy and Mitchel were colleagues on the most influential nationalist newspaper in Irish history, the Nation. But in 1847, relations between the two men became strained, and Mitchel resigned to start his own, more radical, paper. The former friends and colleagues soon became the bitterest of enemies. Their public quarrels over the next few years severely damaged each man's personal reputation — and also damaged the Irish nationalist cause in which each so fervently believed.

Unlike many running Irish feuds, which merely exacerbate old stereotypes about the Gaels being a fractious race, the Mitchel-Duffy controversy haddirect political fallout at a critical point in the development of political separatism in Ireland. The quarrel erupted just when Irish nationalists had an unusual opportunity to bring enormous pressure to bear on the British House of Commons. The Tory party of the 1840s had been shattered, first by Sir Robert Peel's turnabout on free trade in 1846, and then by Peel's death four years later. The modern idea of nearly automatic, lifelong adhesion to strong central parties was still some years off, and the two major British parties were scrambling for friends.