For thirty years J. E. Neale’s portrait of the Elizabethan parliaments was the stuff of textbooks. Highly political and bedeviled by puritanical protobolsheviks, the Virgin Queen’s parliaments were painted as the nursery in which the modern parliamentary system, characterized by an organized Opposition, was born. In the last decade, however, Neale’s interpretations have been challenged and overturned, making obsolete most of the histories of Elizabethan England available to students. The purpose of this article is to assess the new research on Elizabethan Parliaments, to summarize what we now know about the role Parliament played in governing England, and to suggest what remains to be done.

In order to make sense of the newly emerging history of Elizabeth’s parliaments it is important to recap the working assumptions that dominated the first great era of Elizabethan parliamentary history, the Neale/Notestein age. Much of the recent work on Parliament has been in reaction to these mens’ work.

In the past two decades Lord John Russell has suffered a decline in reputation which is undeserved. This has been especially true in regard to his role as foreign secretary in the second Palmerston government. The decline has not resulted from significant new evidence or from a new insight into existing evidence, so much as from a series of apparently accidental circumstances. The most important of these have been the fact that the only recent biography of Russell, by John Prest, placed little stress either on foreign affairs or on his post-1852 career, expressing the belief that he “should have retired” at the end of his first administration.

Prest's influence has been intensified by several major studies of foreign policy, which have given a negative interpretation of Russell's role under Palmerston. Since each of these is the most important work on the topic concerned, their view of Lord John carries considerable weight. Yet, even more than was the case with Prest's biography, their comments about Russell appear on a very few pages, and suggest that the authors viewed the issue of Lord John's relationship with Palmerston as tangential to their research or analysis. The evidence they cite often falls into two categories: 1) statements of biased observers, who had grudges against Russell, or 2) material that is open to other interpretation or is an inadequate and misleading sample of the evidence available.

The period between the early 1880s and the First World War marked the heyday of the British anarchist movement. Anarchism was then a popular topic of discussion. Various newspapers and periodicals expressed interest in the whereabouts and activities of anarchist supporters. Dictionaries and encyclopedias provided detailed information about the anarchist movement. Novels and short stories focused on anarchist figures, while the subject of anarchism arose in parliamentary debates and public speeches.

This extensive interest was not, however, beneficial to the movement. Discussions of anarchism usually took place in a hostile context and references to it were abusive. The movement was described as “a malignant fungoid growth … on the body politic,” and its members as “the very dregs of the population, the riff-raff of rascaldom, professional thieves [and] bullies.” Their humanist motivation was either ignored or denied. Violence appeared to be the characteristic mark of both the theory and practice of anarchism. The anarchist golden age “is to be ushered in … by bomb explosions and dynamic outrages … by inflammatory harangues and attempts at ‘expropriation,’ “ claimed the author of the entry “Anarchists and Anarchy” in the 1894 edition of Hazell's Annual. Anarchism was repeatedly defined as “another name for organised crime,” and its promoters were portrayed as “a pack of bloodthirsty and ferocious criminals who prey upon their fellows for their own gain.” Other references lumped all anarchists together as terrorists and denied that they had any program “but murder.” The style varied from rational analysis to emotional outbursts, but the message was the same: anarchism was society's worst enemy and anarchists the “most noxious beasts that have ever threatened civilised society.”