That complex problems like the causes of the English civil war are constantly subject to reinterpretation is an obvious truism. Twenty years ago we were all embroiled in the gentry controversy; now it is the fashion to lay more stress on the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Lawrence Stone's recent survey is a case in point. Though his title, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, promises a long running start, this quondam disciple of R. H. Tawney places a surprising amount of emphasis on what he calls precipitants and triggers, which, it turns out, are the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Among these is the mishandling of the situation in Scotland. It is well known, of course, that the attempt to impose the new service book in 1637 touched off the chain of events which led to the Long Parliament, but historians have pointed out that this was by no means the first of Charles's errors there. At the very beginning of his reign came the act of revocation, which among other things rescinded “all grants made of crown property since 1540, … all disposition of ecclesiastical property and the erections of such property into temporal lordships.” No such sweeping change came about, of course, but in the view of most scholars this act, though in some sense successful, since it achieved the purpose both of increasing clerical stipends and of providing a machinery for their continuing adjustment, made the Scottish landed classes so mistrustful and fearful for their property that Charles could never gain their confidence. The comment of Sir James Balfour is always quoted: the act “in effect was the ground stone of all the mischief that followed after.”

To Clarendon, the English Civil War was an exercise in folly, pride, and the tragic corruption of the species. Since then, many a thesis has been advanced to explain the Great Rebellion, only to fall before fresh generations of skeptics, each demolishing a predecessor's orthodoxy to set up their own. But old notions die hard. They linger in the words and concepts that once expressed them, which remain impregnated with the old meaning even when the nominal definitions have changed. Such a concept is that of the “Opposition” in early Stuart England. Its history is virtually coextensive with the historiography of the English Revolution, and it remains today at the center of the debate on the origins and meaning of the Revolution.

The concept of an Opposition in prerevolutionary England can be traced back to the eighteenth century. David Hume, writing of the 1620s, saw party conflict as an inherent and fundamentally progressive element in the clash between privilege and prerogative. The “wise and moderate,” he asserted, “regarded the very rise of parties as a happy prognostic of the establishment of liberty.” Here already is the germ of the Whig interpretation, which emerges full-blown a century later in Macaulay:

Shepherds of people had need know the calenders of tempests in the state; which are commonly greatest when things grow to equality; as natural tempests are greatest about the Equinoctia…. Libels and licentious discourses against the state, when they are frequent and open; and in like sort, false news often running up and down to the disadvantage of the state, and hastily embraced; are amongst the signs of troubles…. Seditious tumults and seditious fames differ no more but as brother and sister, masculine and feminine; especially if it come to that, that the best actions of a state, and the most plausible, and which ought to give greatest contentment, are taken in an ill sense, and traduced….

When discords, and quarrels, and factions are carried openly and audaciously, it is a sign the reverence of government is lost…. So when any of the four pillars of government are mainly shaken or weakened (which are Religious, Justice, Counsel, and Treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather.

The activities of the Yorkist council in administration are now known to have been much more extensive than Professor J. F. Baldwin, the author of the classic work on the subject, was prepared to allow. Nor can his account of its judicial work be considered definitive though, so far, this has not been investigated to the same extent as the council's administrative activities. In discussing the judicial effectiveness of the council Baldwin stated that its efforts to suppress disorder were conspicuously unsuccessful in the 1460s (by implication in contrast with earlier successes), and that even though there was a change for the better after 1468 “as regards rioters its administration was anything but vigorous or efficient.” He failed to find a single example of a prominent offender who was ever punished. In spite of this, however, he was somewhat puzzled to note a growing demand for conciliar justice towards the end of Edward IV s reign; a demand which grew to such an extent that under Richard III a clerk was specially paid to deal with the bills, requests and supplications of poor men.

This view of the council's judicial work was based in the main on two things—a belief that until 1468 commissions of arrest, in the majority of cases, were ordered to bring offenders before the chancellor not the council and on the case of Lord Straunge v. Roger Kynaston which Professor Baldwin alleged exposed “the weakness of the council to an extent that is well-nigh incredible.

This brief account of Tocqueville's ideas on aristocratic society and government in England is intended to serve as a sort of introduction to the longer papers that follow in this symposium. For some years the subject of English aristocratic power in the 19th century—especially in connection with the First and Second Reform Acts—has been much discussed. The discussion has dwelt on such questions as whether the aristocracy grew or declined in power, whether the Reform Acts made for a growth or loss of power, whether aristocratic leadership knew precisely what it was doing, and so on. So far this discussion has been carried on, so to speak, exclusively from the inside: that is, in terms of contemporary English events and ideas. In Tocqueville, who was both an Anglophile and an informed and penetrating observer of England from the 1830s until his death in 1859, we have a distinguished outsider. His ideas are always interesting for their own sake. For this symposium they have the added merit of touching on some of its central themes. On occasion, his ideas may strike the reader as exaggerated, ambiguous, even inconsistent, certainly without system. But they are usually suggestive, and merit the historian's serious attention.

Tocqueville's first impression of the English aristocracy was one of great power—a power rooted in its monopoly of landowner ship. As he saw it, the contrast between the French landowning aristocracy and the English was that between an aristocracy, on the one hand, that was land poor, and an aristocracy, on the other hand, that was richly endowed in land. Tocqueville also saw that if landed property did not always lead to economic power—since agriculture did not pay that well—it had a special quality, as compared to other forms of wealth, which was bound to lead to political power.

In January, 1696, Parliament passed an act to reform the procedure used in treason trials. The consequences of this act were immense. It immediately changed the complexion of treason trials from that of conciliar hearings aimed at eliminating the government's enemies to that of actual trials which sought to establish guilt or innocence. Moreover, Parliament subsequently extended some of the key provisions of this act to criminal law proceedings, thus giving the 1696 statute a claim to being one of the well-springs of legal reform in modern England. Most important of all, however, was the effect the act had on politics. It helped to bring to a close an age in which politicians frequently attacked their opponents with charges of treason, and it thus played a part in opening a new age, one where less violent practices were employed in the political struggle.

It is not the least of ironies in English history that an act as important as the Treason Trials Act of 1696 should have received so little scholarly attention. The only historian to give the act more than a few pages is Samuel Rezneck in an article written in 1930. Most historians who work on the period follow the practice of such scholars as G. M. Trevelyan, David Ogg, and Sir Keith Feiling, and either fail to mention the act or note its passage in a sentence or two. Many scholars, especially those of an earlier generation, seem to assume that the act was a natural, perhaps inevitable, reaction to Stuart tyranny—that it was part of the light brought in by William and Mary at the end of a dark century—and, hence, that there is little need to discuss it.

“Social Darwinism” means almost as many things as there are people who have written on it; but this paper takes it to be a generic term for theories of human social development and maintenance which are in some way inspired by biological evolutionary theories—this “inspiration” could take the form of seeing human sociality as a straight extension of the animal (and perhaps plant) domain, or it could involve some sort of analogy. In discussion of the roots of social Darwinism two names invariably appear—that of Charles Darwin himself, obviously, and that of Herbert Spencer. Here, however is the end of agreement. Who was the more important and influential, divides scholars right down the middle; as also do the questions of who really came first and whether their doctrines were essentially the same.

Because there is so much disagreement, no one has yet adequately argued to precisely the right conclusion. To anticipate, this paper argues that both Darwin and Spencer represent fundamental advances (or, less normatively, shifts beyond) their common major source, Thomas Robert Malthus; and that although there was overlap (and undoubted mutual borrowing) their positions were fundamentally dissimilar. Consequently, a search for the roots of Social Darwinism yields two sources, Darwin and Spencer respectively, and that what came from these sources was different. This essay begins with a brief discussion of Malthus's views, paying special attention to his relevance to social Darwinian lines of thought, considers the views of Spencer and Darwin on human social structures, and concludes by comparing the two thinkers, noting their similarities, but arguing that these are far outweighed by their differences.

Whether Burke is placed in the tradition of natural law theorists or the school of historical utilitarians, scholars agree that his conception of liberty was inextricably linked to a belief in the inviolability of landed property, its salutary transmission through the ages, and a correspondingly acute historical consciousness. Perhaps the subsequent universalization of liberty and the gradual respectability of capital as an alternate form of property have obscured the significance of another principle which Burke invariably associated with liberty, but which could neither be universalized nor transformed. That principle was the aristocratic quality of honor, which, for Burke, as for generations of aristocratic spokesmen who succeeded him, remained a condition essential to liberty's preservation and transmission. The theme of honor has received some consideration from scholars in fields of literary criticism and, recently, social anthropology. But it has not attracted the attention it requires, particularly of modern historians, since Burckhardt, who characterized its presence in the Renaissance as “that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism.” This essay examines Burke's conception of honor and its affinity with his ideas of liberty.

Burke's concern for honor was hardly a novelty. In the eighteenth century, honor was taken seriously. It was a quality extolled by Addison, lauded by Pope. Moreover, honor had been analyzed by adherents of both the “selfish” and “moral sense” schools of thought among the British ethical philosophers, particularly in their disquisitions about self-love and benevolence. Hobbes had considered honor to be “the opinion of power.” It legitimized self-aggrandizement. Mandeville, similarly, conceived of honor as a worldly morality inconsistent with virtue which, after all, required self-denial. The man of honor was impelled by a pagan ethic to seek the rewards of approbation. He cherished posthumous fame rather than salvation. Consequently, he behaved according to a code that was superior to the laws of God and the laws of one's country.

Frank Ives Scudamore remains one of the least known of those Victorian civil servants who were, to use Sir James Stephen's phrase, statesmen in disguise. Readers of Trollope's autobiography may recall that Scudamore, the novelist's younger rival in the Post Office bureaucracy, emerged the victor in their 1867 contest for the department's Second Secretaryship. Indeed, it was Scudamore's triumph which finally convinced Trollope to resign from the Post Office in order to devote full time to writing. Yet Scudamore's importance has a much more substantial foundation than this incident in literary history. Even if one does not completely accept the Spectator's judgment that Scudamore was “perhaps the very ablest [civil servant] in the service of the crown,” he was still an administrator of fundamental consequence. As director of the first significant experiment in nationalization undertaken in modern British history—the 1870 acquisition of the telegraphs—Scudamore played a major role in the growth of the modern state.

Scudamore's impact on the course of government expansion has not been sufficiently studied and explored. It is certainly correct, as Professor Perkin recently pointed out, that the Victorians talked more of nationalization than actually attempting it. However, the fact that Scudamore was involved in an unusual activity does not mean that the endeavor was minor or the results unimportant. After all, he managed a department which in 1874 had over 3,600 offices spread in a network across the entire country and which collected over £1,000,000 in gross revenue. Such an operation deserves historical consideration in its own right.

The Great Reform Act has received a great deal of much needed attention in the last decade. One mode of getting at its significance has, however, been largely ignored. The mode usually followed, particularly recently, has been to examine what the Whig framers of the Act thought they were about, and then, by means of electoral analysis, whether they achieved their object. The two questions are not necessarily the same, of course. For example, most historians of the period would now agree that Professor D. C. Moore, however valuable and stimulating his contribution to the debate, is wrong about Whig intentions. Some may suspect he is also at least in part wrong about the electoral system which grew out of the Act. That, however, has yet to be proven. Yet, even if we could know all about the reformed electoral system, we would still not know all about the impact of the Great Reform Act. For in history what is important is not only what actually happened, but what people of the time believe happened. It is to this sort of question that I want to turn my attention in this paper. Because one of the best ways to appreciate the great significance of the Reform Act is to examine the change it wrought in the attitudes of politicians, particularly of Tory politicians.

Undoubtedly, the two most important of the recent works on the Act are the books of Professors Brock and Cannon. Essentially, both represent a vindication of the main outlines of the old “Whig interpretation.” Thus, both Brock and Cannon see the Act as a response to mounting pressures out-of-doors, the culmination of a long historical process, and an important turning point in the emergence of a more liberal and broadly based political system. Nor does either doubt that the Act marked an important concession to the middle classes, or that it deserves its old designation of “Great.”

The friction between civil and military authorities was never greater than during the Great War of 1914-1918. The unprecedented casualties suffered by the British Army and involvement of every element of British life in the conflagration gave added intensity to this conflict. The ability of British democracy to wage total war was put to a severe test. Where did the responsibility of the civilians end in formulating strategy? Where did the authority of the soldiers begin? This strategic debate largely centered on the size of Britain's commitment to the ghastly slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front.

Before 1914 British war planners had thought of a short war with at most only limited involvement in Europe. After Britain's plunge into war, the civil and military authorities decided to employ the small professional British Army on the continent to save France from being overrun, a decision made easier by the widespread belief that the war would be over within a few months. By this continental commitment Britain became involved in a long and bloody war of attrition in France and Flanders.

As 1914 ended in stalemate in the West with few of the original members of the British Expeditionary Force still on their feet the debate over the employment of future British armies began in earnest. The government's chief military adviser was Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Although the public viewed Kitchener as Britain's greatest soldier, his appointment was almost certainly a mistake.

In matters of public controversy the eighteenth-century Englishman displayed a cast of mind that was legalistic and unpragmatic. The first question he tended to ask was not what the benefits of a policy might be but whether anyone possessed the right to implement it. Public debate was legitimist in emphasis. There were few disputes where the issue of jurisdiction was ignored; very often jurisdiction was the only issue in contention. The great example of this is to be found in the debate over American taxation. The question was not whether the taxes had been voted for some improper purpose or whether the colonies could afford to pay. The argument turned on the issue of authority: did Parliament have the right to tax the colonies for any purpose whatever regardless of their ability to pay? The same emphasis on jurisdiction is to be found in the debate over the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. This act restricted the right of members of the royal family to marry whom they pleased. Opponents of the act condemned it not in terms of policy but in terms of right and jurisdiction. It was “repugnant to the natural rights of mankind.” It was “null and invalid.” Parliament possessed no authority to legislate such a measure, and it could be submitted to “only as the effect of power.” This eighteenth-century pre-occupation with legitimacy is evident even in the writings of its most radical and eccentric thinkers. Thomas Paine's chief complaint against the ancien régime in England was not that it governed badly but that it governed without legitimate authority. Whether it governed well or ill, it remained by Paine's standards an usurpation. Paine's zeal for democratic legitimacy may have been peculiar, but his method of debate was not.

The fact that the reform bill of 1867 was the work of a Conservative government has always seemed paradoxical, although it became clear soon after its passage that the bill was less of a paradox than supposed at first. Like the great Reform Act of 1832, the Act of 1867 produced profoundly conservative consequences, and they were conservative with a large as well as a small “c,” conservative in a narrowly partisan as well as a broadly social sense. The Act was certainly conservative in that it was an early concession to public opinion, or what Burke would have called a timely Reformation. It postponed further reform for nearly 20 years, and as G. D. H. Cole said ironically, that was a considerable achievement. In the general election of 1874 there were already signs that the bill had produced a great deal of solidly Conservative voting in the suburbs that ringed the large English borough constituencies. Moreover, when reform did come again in 1884 and 1885, it shifted constituency boundaries to take in middle class Conservative suburbs, and by creating electoral districts that were more or less equal, it shifted representation in the direction of the southeast, a commercial region dominated by light industry and therefore eminently Conservative. After 1885 there were many more constituencies, and they were smaller and cheaper to contest. It is very likely also that they were more homogeneously middle or working class, and that more Conservative politicians were now coming from the middle class and more Liberals from the working class. The electorate and the parliament which it influenced were moving in a recognizably modern direction after 1885, without having suffered the dire democratic fate envisioned in 1867.

Joseph Chamberlain startled many in Great Britain in 1895 when he informed Parliament that he “regarded many of our colonies in the condition of undeveloped estates. ” At the same time he announced the British Government's intention to consider “the judicious investment of British money” in British Crown Colonies to develop them “for the benefit of their population and for the benefit of the greater population which is outside. ” He thus not only signalled the Government's willingness to attempt alternative methods of development, but specifically proposed a new approach. However, this new approach required a change in attitude by those who supervised the colonial empire. The permanent officials at the Colonial Office had to be persuaded to give high priority to colonial economic development and to be more sympathetic to and cooperative with developmentally oriented colonial governors. The permanent officials were never so persuaded.

Throughout the nineteenth century, auto-eroticism was viewed as a great evil, a threat to the individual and to society. At one time or another, nearly every disease which nineteenth-century doctors could not cure was blamed on self-abuse. Summing up the relationship between masturbation and illness, French doctor Eugene Beckland wrote in 1842, “Many physicians of high authority have maintained that two-thirds of the diseases to which the human race is liable have had their origins in certain solitary practices ….” As to the impact of masturbation on society, Dr. Révéillé Parisé observed in 1828,

Since 1953, when René Spitz published his important article on the subject, a number of scholars have tried to explain the intense concern with masturbation in the nineteenth century. Spitz argued that the heightened interest in self-abuse reflected the shift to Protestant culture with its emphasis on individual responsibility for sin. More recently, John and Robin Haller used similar arguments to explain it. Other writers such as E. H. Hare and Edward Shorter have argued that one reason why fear of masturbation increased was that people began indulging in the solitary vice to a greater extent than ever before. Men and women were masturbating more—and if they read medical journals on the subject—enjoying it less. Hare speculated that this was because of fear of venereal disease caused by intercourse, a great concern in the nineteenth century. Masturbation was safer. Shorter, who saw masturbation as part of a general increase in sexual appetite, asserted that it was “unlikely that masturbation … was practiced on a wide scale before the premarital sexual revolution.” It is not likely that historians will uncover reliable data on incidence of self-abuse to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

The connection between political reform and aristocratic decline is central to an understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. No one denies that the landed elite dominated the institutions which passed the parliamentary reform acts of 1832 and 1867. However, historians continue to speculate about the motives that inspired these remarkable measures. Was the ruling class retreating, retrenching, being overthrown, or surrendering gracefully? The articles appearing in this issue by David Spring, Richard Davis, and Thomas Gallagher occasion an opportunity to reflect further on this question. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a neglected aspect of the reform process, especially in relation to the 1832 act, the first and most important step in the aristocracy's displacement. This element was the spirit of reform, a progressive force, that made the great reform bill something more than either a concession or a cure.

Professors Davis and Gallagher remind us of the extraordinary change in the political firmament wrought by the 1832 act. Those who argue, in response to the traditional interpretation of the Whig historians, that the great bill scarcely altered anything find it increasingly difficult to sustain their case.1 John Cannon, Michael Brock, and others have already undermined much of the ground upon which the revisionists, led by D. C. Moore, based their analysis. An extraordinary array of convincing evidence has been adduced to show that Earl Grey and his colleagues were not in the business of trying to cure the source of demands for reform in order to avoid yielding to the demands themselves. Professor Davis has been particularly effective in demonstrating Moore's anachronistic view of deference.