In the autumn of 1529, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, who had served as Henry VIII's principal minister for a decade and a half, fell from power. On October 17 he surrendered the great seal, thus formally resigning as lord chancellor, the position he had held since 1515. A few days earlier, on October 9, he had been indicted in the Court of King's Bench for offenses under the fourteenth-century statute of praemunire (which restricted papal powers within England), and on October 22 he was to acknowledge his guilt in an indenture made with the king. Nevertheless, he was not utterly destroyed. He remained archbishop of York and was allowed to set off for his diocese in early 1530.

The fashionable explanation for these events is to see Wolsey as the victim of faction, a notion briefly asserted or implied in much current writing and substantially elaborated by E. W. Ives. For J. J. Scarisbrick, Wolsey was “the victim of an aristocratic putsch”: “There can be no doubt that for long an aristocratic party, led by the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, had been hoping to ‘catch him in a brake’ and dispossess him, and that they looked to Anne Boleyn as their weapon … it was an aristocratic faction that led the way.” For David Starkey, “Boleyns, Aragonese, nobles … sank their fundamental differences and went into allegiance against him. Together they worked on Henry's temporary disillusionment with his minister, and the pressure coupled with Anne's skilful management of her lover, was enough to break the trust of almost twenty years and destroy Wolsey.”

The collaboration of Richardson and Sayles in the investigation of early English parliamentary history has long been justly celebrated. A full generation has passed since the publication of the first of those studies of theirs which have done so much to widen and deepen knowledge about medieval parliaments and have made their names, usually coupled, household words with students of medieval English constitutional history. The authors were influenced, no doubt, by some earlier historians, and the statement that they built on foundations laid by Maitland and McIlwain is not incorrect. In the volume, however, which is here under special consideration, The Governance of Mediaeval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta, they do not undertake, qua historians as distinguished from historical critics, to come this side of the reign of King John, when parliaments had not as yet assumed their later form and functions.

I

Why, it seems not inappropriate to ask, was this latest joint product of their historical activities written; to what class or classes of readers was it particularly addressed? It was evidently not designed as a manual of the type that students of English constitutional history have long been familiar with; for one thing, its chronological scope is limited to about two centuries, from c. 1000 to 1215; and much of the book would be unintelligible to beginning students of the subject. An apologia, which serves as a Preface, and a preliminary chapter suggest answers to the questions that have just been asked.

Early one Sunday morning, in August 1839, “a very authoritative knock" on the door awoke the young Chartist William Aitken and his family. After a thorough search of his house for “revolutionary and seditious documents,” the chief constable and his men placed Aitken under arrest and marched him through the silent streets of Ashton-under-Lyne. Recalling his sense of distress and anguish some thirty years later, Aitken tried to find solace in the ultimate triumph of his principles, in his conviction that “the cause of liberty is eternal, and that the principles of democracy, which are now becoming universal, must be right and must in the end prevail.” This optimistic reaffirmation of his life's struggle for “bread and liberty” appeared in the fifth installment of his autobiography in the Ashton News, a Liberal newspaper. Unfortunately, the tone of quiet confidence and hope that pervaded his autobiography apparently masked a growing sense of private despair and ever deepening bouts of depression. Some two weeks before the publication of this installment, his wife, Mary, had found Aitken lying on the bedroom floor, “with a fearful gash in his throat.”

That many thousands of working men and women “thronged the streets” on the day of his funeral was hardly surprising. The son of a Scottish cordwainer and later sergeant-major, Aitken came from, as the Ashton News put it, “the people” and “knew intimately their feelings and their wishes, and could express what the many felt with fullness and point.” His own identification with the working class came through clearly in the title of his autobiography, “Remembrances and Struggles of A Working Man for Bread and Liberty.”

In most histories of Great Britain in the eighteenth century the ministry of Henry Pelham, 1743 to 1754, is accorded small space. For example, Basil Williams' The Whig Supremacy, in the Oxford History of England, devotes only slightly more than thirty pages to these eleven years. No full-scale biography of Pelham has appeared since Archdeacon Coxe's enormous two-volume work in 1829, and this, as Macaulay wrote of a similar work, was the product of the author's scissors and paste pot rather than of his pen. Much has been done on phases of the career of Newcastle, but no complete biography has been attempted. It has been suggested that the enormous mass of material in the Newcastle and Hardwicke papers available in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum has scared off possible biographers. This, however, is not the only explanation. At one time I gave serious consideration to devoting several years to a full biography of the Duke; but in the end it was the quality of Newcastle and not the quantity of the material which deterred me.

The neglect of Pelham, however, is more puzzling; and appears to be a case of unsalutary neglect. Possibly the best explanation lies in the Pittolatry (if the term is allowable) of the great majority of both English and American historians writing on this period. Usually Pelham is not even ranked as a John the Baptist to William Pitt, but rather is treated in the same relationship to him as the older interpretation of the Old Regime in France is to the French Revolution and the Unreformed House of Commons to the Reform Bill of 1832.

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

In summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored with researcher Horace Cayton. What attracted him to Tiger Bay for his next project was a scandal that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic around Britain's growing population of what were referred to as brown babies. These children were the product of sexual encounters that sometimes took place between local white women and some of the 200,000 African American GIs who were at different points stationed across the United Kingdom during the later part of the Second World War. Using the extensive field notes Drake kept during his sojourn in Cardiff, this article reconstructs the nature and feel of a neighborhood where, by the 1940s, half of all residents were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Drake's work serves as a window onto the nature of racism and ideas about race in late-imperial Britain, alongside the parallel presence of metropolitan community life in Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multicultural communities.

This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Family Planning Association emerged in Britain as one of the largest providers of infertility diagnosis for men and women. In the early years of the century, women were coming to birth control centers seeking cures for their childlessness, well before those centers began officially offering infertility investigation and treatment. What changed by mid-century was the emergence of a determination not only to welcome infertility patients at birth control clinics but to establish the clinics as centers for infertility research and care. Beginning in the late 1930s, eugenicists concerned with the impact of population decline on the social acceptability of birth control formed an alliance with feminist medical professionals determined both to empower women in involuntarily childless marriages to understand and address the causes of their infertility and to shift the paradigm of infertility treatment away from its over-focus on the female body. This political marriage of convenience gave birth to a large-scale movement to diagnose both male and female infertility through the auspices of the Family Planning Association. The organization's infertility program, in turn, spurred the development of infertility as a field of medical research in postwar Britain and encouraged the expansion of National Health Service provision of infertility care.

Using evidence from underused manuscript and archaeological material as well as printed texts, the author demonstrates that the early Virginia plantation was far from a disaster. Focusing on the period 1609–1618, the author situates the colony within the globally connected environments of early modern trade and empire. The author reveals how the expectations of the colony's proponents were met on a variety of levels, and the colony was successfully undertaken through the mediation of global pressures and English corporate culture within the specific local spaces of North America. The Virginia plantation was self-sufficient, economically diverse, and integrated conceptually and practically into the wider activities of its investors and leadership. Through this interpretation, this article contributes to the understanding of practices of colonization in early modern America and the connectedness of English overseas activities and the awareness of the Virginia Company participants’ of the colony's place within wider, global economies.

For the past twelve years one Whig historian after another has attempted to turn back the tide of Jacobite studies, meeting with as much success as King Canute. The purpose of this article is to challenge Clyve Jones's conclusions in this journal (“Jacobitism and the Historian: The Case of William, 1st Earl Cowper,” supra, 23, 4 (Winter 1992): 681-96) that Lord Cowper never became a Jacobite, that Lord Orrery was not a key player in the Atterbury Plot, and that the Duke of Wharton was not a committed Jacobite until the end of the plot. Jones uses a discussion of the evidence of Lord Cowper's involvement with Jacobitism as a means of dismissing the whole subject, using the same arguments as previous Whig critics. “James III” and his advisers were wildly optimistic about the prospects of a Stuart restoration and, therefore, their testimony may largely be disregarded. James, on the contrary, was pessimistic by temperament and may be criticized for over caution rather than rashness. The Stuart papers, Jones argues, are not complete. What historical collection is? Despite the gigantic size of the collection, some papers that were brought to England from Rome have disappeared, notably the letter written from the Tower by Lord Oxford in 1716, expressing the utmost indignation at the harsh treatment meted out to him by George I and the Whig ministers and offering his services to James in the management of Jacobite affairs in England. This letter was found by Sir James Mackintosh when the collection was first deposited at Carlton House, but it has disappeared since. An additional difficulty is that after the discovery of the Atterbury Plot by Walpole and Townshend in 1722, Atterbury, Lord Stafford, and Lord Orrery, leading conspirators, destroyed most of their papers before being arrested. Similarly, Lady Cowper destroyed a large part of her diary and a substantial part of her husband's papers at the time of the Atterbury Plot. The papers destroyed were probably more significant than what remains and this helps to explain why Walpole could find so little evidence about the plot that would stick in a court of law. A good deal of material, nevertheless, has survived, and is it too much to ask that it should be used in the same way as any other historical evidence?