The reign of Richard II has been one of the most popular subjects of attention for medievalists in recent years. As a result of this renewed interest, the ‘tyranny’ of Richard II's final years has been resurrected in the past decade in a new form by R. H. Jones as well as in its more traditional guise which can be found in the pages of T. F. Tout by Caroline Barron. This resurrection has not, however, gone unchallenged. Richard G. Davies has recently demonstrated the inadequacies of such a view in relation to Richard II's ecclesiastical policy, and research is now under way in regard to both Ireland and the Ricardian household which seems to limit still further the confines of the ‘tyranny.’ At the very heart of this concept is the condemnation of the King by both his contemporaries and modern historians for his development of a large military establishment which he employed to enforce his own will. This establishment has been pictured as a praetorian guard composed of the very dregs of society and eager to join Richard in a policy of absolutism. The archers of the crown deserve study in any attempt to examine the royal military establishment and to assess the tyrannical intentions of this ill-fated ruler.

Richard II, confronted with the recurrent efforts of a faction of magnates to control the governance of the realm, responded with an attempt to assert his personal will.

R. W. Church began his classic work on The Oxford Movement with the remark that “What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt, in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the days of the Reform Bill.” Historians of the Oxford Movement who, unlike Church, were not participants in the events of which they write need continually to remind themselves that the Oxford Movement was not a premeditated and carefully planned theological campaign. Rather, it was an ad hoc measure to meet a definite and immediate problem.

In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, agitation for reform of all the national institutions swept across England, and included in these national institutions was the Church of England. In 1828 a resolution favoring the repeal of the Test Act was carried in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, and in 1829 the Relief Bill was carried, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold offices under the crown. With the Reform Bill of 1832 the electoral structure for seating men in Parliament was brought into partial conformity with contemporary developments and population distribution. And with the success of parliamentary reform, English churchmen feared that church reform would soon be thrust upon them. The bishops as a group had been hostile to parliamentary reform and to reform in general, with the result that popular pamphlets against churchmen and demand for church reform reached alarming proportions.

In the purview of theater history, as on the theatrical stage itself, performers' and writers' command on attention is almost complete. Ancient Greek gave a word to its mask builders (skeuopoio), but apart from distinct vocabulary, history leaves few traces of theatrical laborers. A glance through any number of theatrical books, periodicals, bibliographies, biographical guides, and encyclopedias reveals the predominance of performers in the public eye, though managers, directors, designers, and critics occasionally attract scholarly studies. Even among novels, journalism, and theatrical guidebooks—genres that venture behind the scenes—the personnel that dress, light, paint, and build shows are rarely present. Their identity and labor is marginalized in the annals because it is marginalized in the conceptualization of what is important in theater production. Susan Todd takes unusual measures to challenge this tradition by documenting the experience of women stage managers in the contemporary theater, but in the historical realm this has not been attempted. Writers devote attention to how the stage actually worked (how stage effects were achieved and how the creative chain of command functioned), but to date no one has examined the structures and traditions of backstage labor by asking basic questions about the sociopolitical organization of the work.

Only in highly esoteric treatises or the lightest of literature do theatrica jewelers, armorers, weavers, hosiers, basket makers, shoemakers, furnishers, cosmeticians, perruquiers, costumiers, seamsters, dressers, property makers, carpenters, gas fitters, printers, or ticket takers usually appear. These are all specialized trades and occupations indispensable to the building and running of nineteenth-century theatrical entertainment.

A significant aspect of the religious scene in the early Stuart period was the survival of vibrant religious nonconformity in spite of Bancroft's “reconstruction of the English Church.” Historians have recently concentrated on the periods of excited religious politics under Elizabeth and the latter part of Charles I's reign and have tended to accept Hacket's Restoration apology that there was no serious opposition to official religious policy in the intervening years. But attempts to explain the phoenix-like rise of Puritanism in Caroline England by reference to socio-economic disequilibrium are not fully satisfactory.

Decades ago, Roland G. Usher, who did much to highlight Bancroft's reconstruction, explained the origins of the resurgent Puritanism of the Laudian period by pointing to the mid-Jacobean period. W. H. Clark concurred: lax ecclesiastical administration under Abbot made it possible for Puritans to re-group, starting from about 1614. Both men assumed that there had been effective enforcement of the new Canons of 1604, and of the official policy enunciated at the Hampton Court Conference, until Abbot came on the scene. Analysis of the Church court records indicates that this was simply not so. The number of Puritans continued to rise while vigorous enforcement was spasmodic.

Ironically, the years to which Usher and Clark attributed the origins of Caroline Puritanism were in fact the period when enforcement was possible. First, the Pamphlet War aroused by the new settlement had died down. Second, only two bishops, John King and George Mountain, held the See of London between 1611 and 1628.

At the beginning of the Edwardian period no young British politician appeared so assured of a bright future as Lord Hugh Cecil. A son of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, he was not only of distinguished lineage but possessed great intelligence and eloquence. His parliamentary oratory was compelling despite his lanky, ungainly appearance and nervous gestures. He combined a logical approach with transparent honesty and courage. So sincere was he in his convictions, no matter how eccentric some might be, that even the most sophisticated (and cynical) in the Commons listened to him with respect. Even the normally reserved Annual Register commented admiringly on Cecil's performance in a debate on the 1902 Education Bill. Lord Hugh, it claimed, had made the “most striking speech” — one which “was recognized by the best judges as bringing him within the front rank of modern parliamentary orators.” Two years later that shrewd observer of the House of Commons, Sir Henry Lucy, predicted an even greater achievement for the young Conservative. Lucy asserted that by remaining with his party despite an aversion to Tariff Reform, Cecil would “in due time, succeed to the Premiership held by his father and in succession by his cousin.”

Yet by 1914 no one of prominence expected Lord Hugh to gain (or perhaps even to seek) high office. He remained, as the Guardian later stated, one whose speeches “would always fill the House,” but as a politician to be reckoned with in terms of power, his career was finished.

This article examines key themes in the political and intellectual life of E. P. Thompson. It argues for the centrality of romanticism to his work; it focuses on his unfinished study of the early Romantics. Thompson drew parallels between socialist hopes and disappointments of his own day and the reactions of the early romantic poets to the failed promise of the French Revolution. This article charts the trajectory of the early Romantics as they moved from political engagement to retreat, and relates this trajectory to Thompson's own politics. Thompson discerned a pattern whereby intellectuals and artists moved through stages from political engagement to disenchantment and then to “apostasy” or default. Disenchantment could be a productive condition; at issue was how the poet handled the “authenticity of experience,” how disenchantment was dealt with in verse. Both Thompson and the Romantics privileged the concept of “experience” which they set in opposition to abstract theory. The article's final section turns to themes that Thompson had intended to address but left unfinished, including shifting views of patriotism and the defeated cause of women's rights. For Thompson the romantic impulse was ultimately linked to utopian desire, to the capacity to imagine that which is “not yet.”

The Scottish Reformation Society's The Bulwark (1851–present) was the Victorian era's most influential anti-Catholic periodical, a reputation based on its self-proclaimed devotion to “facts.” Attempting to counter a unified Catholic Church in a period of pronounced intra-Protestant conflict, the Bulwark sought to root religious controversy in the increasingly popular phenomenon of statistical inquiry. The Bulwark’s obsession with collating and interpreting religion-based numbers was unique not for its existence, but for its sheer extent. It thus exemplifies how “official” statistical documents, methods, and conclusions were translated into the concerns of popular religious culture. In particular, the Bulwark’s ongoing surveys of Catholicism's “progress,” intended to frighten Protestants into action, weaponized statistical discourses that were used in more measured fashion elsewhere. To that end, the Bulwark argued that only Protestants had the right mindset to put religious statistics into a proper explanatory framework, whereas Catholics manipulated their own data for dishonest rhetorical purposes that the Bulwark disclaimed. The Bulwark’s statistical turn, which bypassed the sectarianism of its theological articles, positioned it as a voice uniting the interests of all Protestant readers against Parliament's dangerously tolerant brand of liberalism.

This essay reconsiders the character and significance of Edmund Burke's attitude to the seventeenth-century civil wars and interregnum. Burke may have venerated the “revolution principles” of 1688–89 over those of the 1640s, not least in the Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he notoriously compares English dissenting radicals to regicidal Puritans. Yet his response to the first Stuart revolution is more complex than has commonly been allowed and is closely bound up with Burke's earlier parliamentary career as a prominent member of the Rockingham Whig connection. The revival of an anti-Stuart idiom within the extra-parliamentary opposition of the 1760s, together with the mounting conflict with the North American colonies, gave renewed prominence to the memory of the civil wars within English political discourse. The Rockinghamites attempted to exploit this development—without compromising their own, more conservative reading of seventeenth-century history—but they were also its victims. In the years that followed, Burke and his colleagues were repeatedly identified by their political opponents with the spirit of Puritan rebellion and Cromwellian usurpation. These circumstances provide a new perspective on Burke's interpretation of the nation's revolutionary past; they also offer important insights into his writings and speeches in response to the French Revolution.

This article reappraises the debate about war prevention in the Bryce Group, the first study circle in Britain to devise a plan for the League of Nations. While scholars have tended to associate pro–league of nations activists with idealism, more focused accounts of the group have mostly depicted its postwar plan as a product of realistic thinking. Drawing on the underused manuscripts of the intellectual founders of the League of Nations, this study first reveals that their early thinking defies simple categorization. Not only was their war prevention plan realistic about the role of armed force but it also depended critically on idealistic expectations about the moral force of public opinion. This article shows that realistic and idealistic views could rarely be separated, and both developed the group's plan for peace, which incorporated the collective use of force as a crucial element of the postwar order. A mixture of the two views, however, hardly ensured consistencies and a balance between them. The paradox of collective security discussed by the group in 1914–15—that peace at least in part rested on the threat of force—was unresolved by the foundation of the League, and remains intact to this day.