Richard II, one of the most puzzling kings of late medieval England, has been the subject of controversy ever since his forced abdication in 1399. He often has been portrayed as a tyrant or, at times, as a madman by historians. Recently the trend is toward a reassessment of Richard's reign free from the biased Whig interpretation of the past. R. H. Jones took a first step in that direction in 1968 with the publication of The Royal Policy of Richard II: Absolutism in the Middle Ages. Jones viewed Richard as a king inclined toward absolutism but lacking the taint of rancorousness or despotism ascribed to him by historians since Stubbs. Subsequently two books, a Festschrift, and several articles have appeared, delineating more aspects of the reign. Since May McKisack's volume in the Oxford History of England series appeared in 1959, the number of works concerning the reign has been steadily growing. The recent publication of Anthony Tuck's Richard II and the English Nobility offers an opportunity to reexamine the place of Richard II in history. The divergence of scholarship since 1959 from the traditional interpretations will be seen as the major constitutional problems of the reign are scrutinized. After first examining the influence of William Shakespeare and William Stubbs in shaping the historiography of the reign a chronological discussion of the period from 1377 to 1399 will follow.

The growth of subjectivity in the religious life of the later Middle Ages, in discipline and worship as well as doctrine, both without and within the corporation of the clergy, was an important motif in the history of the Church in England. A more personal interpretation of religious obligations affected even matters of bedrock importance to the life of the organized church, such as the duty of tithing. Of particular interest in this connection in England was the cause célèbre created in London in the 1420's by a maverick Franciscan, William Russell, who preached that under certain conditions lay persons might devote their personal tithes at will to any pious or charitable use. Russell's sermon led to his condemnation as a heretic. But the reasons for the extraordinary controversy that he stirred up become clear only when one recognizes the place of his sermon in a long dispute between the parish clergy of London and their parishoners about the precise obligation of personal tithes in the city.

The prosecution of William Russell before Archbishop Henry Chichele and the Convocation of Canterbury was an odd affair and, in spite of their prolixity, its records leave unsolvable riddles for medievalists. The process against Russell comprises the longest trial in Archbishop Chichele's register—perhaps in that of any medieval Archbishop of Canterbury. Minutes of the prosecution and wordy ancillary documents fill all or parts of twenty-six folio pages of the register (fifty-two printed pages in the splendid printed edition of E.F. Jacob). Yet in reading this material one gathers hardly more than a crabbed impression of the learned proofs and literary citations that Russell mustered in defense of this teaching on personal tithes. What is most striking to a reader of this transcript is the vehemence with which Archbishop Chichele and his clergy in the Convocation prosecuted this errant friar, in whose sermon they saw a clear and present danger to the endowment of London parish churches.

King Henry I, for most of his reign, exercised unrivaled authority over the English church. Following the Concordat of London in 1107 which formally ended his bitter dispute with Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, Henry reestablished effective control over the ecclesiastical affairs of England. During the remaining twenty-eight years of his rule, he assiduously cultivated and generally sustained friendly relations with the papacy while maintaining royal control over the internal matters of the English church.

There is, however, a dramatic exception to this picture of royal primacy. In 1125, the papal legate, Cardinal John of Crema, made a spectacular tour of England. During his six-months stay, John exercised greater authority than any other papal legate sent to England during the reign of Henry I. As Austin Lane Poole observes, of the nine legates dispatched between 1100 and 1135, “one only—John of Crema in 1125—was permitted to preside over a church synod or to exercise any legatine authority.” To underscore the unprecedented nature of this visit, neither of Henry's predecessors, William the Conqueror and William Rufus, had allowed a foreign legate to exert such power within England.

This paper will examine the events leading up to the legatine mission of 1125 and attempt to explain why Henry sanctioned this rare exhibition of papal authority within his kingdom.

Traditionally the later Middle Ages in England have received a notoriously bad press from historians. In 1878 the great Stubbs threw his immense prestige behind the statement “the most enthusiastic admirer of medieval life must grant that all that was good and great was languishing even to death” and, for good measure condemned the fifteenth century as “a worn-out helpless age that calls for pity without sympathy, and yet balances weariness with something like regrets.” A decade after Stubbs wrote these sounding cadences an Oxford cleric, W. Denton, published a book crammed with pessimistic utterances so extreme that they were very nearly caricature. The country was impoverished because its soil was exhausted. The very people were morally inferior to their ancestors, the nobility as a class were as physically degenerate as they were ill-educated. Power had become concentrated in the hands of too few: a minority so powerful as to be almost the peers of the king himself. The rest of the nobility encumbered with debt, due to the cost of war and personal extravagance, had lost their former and legitimate influence.

Even those who derided these wild extravagances continued to regard the wretched century with immense distaste. As the tale went the premature Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment collapsed into near-anarchy, followed by the constitutional backsliding of the Yorkists and Henry VII: a “despotism” wholly alien to English political conditions, but mercifully of short duration.

It is difficult to generalize about how people at any point in time view the process of growing old and the aged themselves. Attitudes towards old people have perhaps always been ambiguous and are probably ambiguous in western societies today. In seventeenth-century England, which in so many ways combined tradition and modernity, the ambivalent attitude towards the elderly included both traditional and modern aspects in three ways. First, as with traditional societies, early modern Englishmen looked upon old age as simply another stage in life, one of the seven through which all persons must pass; at the same time, old age was seen as something entirely different, a reversal of all previous stages. The latter view, which sociologists have labeled the “implicit” view, sees life as a constant process of expansion and growth until one reaches old age when the process is halted and reversed. Secondly, as in other traditional societies, old age was seen as a period of great dignity and wisdom, with the elderly deserving the respect and admiration of all other persons. Alongside this view in seventeenth-century England, old age was thought of as a time of folly and old people were described in undesirable terms. Thirdly, there were two ways of looking at death and its nearness: the traditional Christian view, held by many seventeenth-century theologians, was that death was entirely in God's hands and was a relief from the suffering of earthly life. The more modern view, held by others in the seventeenth-century, was that death was postponable by sensible precautions or by the science of medicine. Drawing on the literature of the age, this article will attempt to show old age in all of these various ways and point out the ambiguities.

The growth of an opposition party in the House of Commons is a primary reason given for the altered distribution of power within the government of England in the early seventeenth century. While historians are not unaware that opposition also emerged in the Upper Chamber of Parliament, little serious investigation of this phenomena has been undertaken since it has not been viewed as essential to an explanation of the growing constitutional crisis within England. Consequently, the nature and extent of noble dissidence continues to be a subject of vague generalization including no small amount of contradictory assumptions and conclusions. The traditional interpretation may be termed the “personalist” view of opposition in the House of Lords and has been dominant at least since Samuel Rawson Gardiner's massive study of England in the early seventeenth century. This explanation, which still prevails among historians, asserts that opposition was based on little more than personal rivalries and jealousies over power and status among the members of the peerage. Indeed it is argued that monarchs encouraged “government by division” as a major weapon in the maintenance of their own authority. Those who view noble opposition in this manner usually assert that it had no important ideological or philosophical underpinnings, little continuity or organization of the type associated with the rise of opposition in the Commons, and minimal constitutional impact and significance.

Historians have long recognized that England was a haven for many French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in their native land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They have also acknowledged the subsequent contributions which these immigrants made to English society. But scholars have largely ignored the financial assistance given many Huguenots which helped them adjust to a new society.

The purpose of this article is to describe the amount and the administration of the most important element of this financial assistance—the Civil List funds given the Huguenots from 1696 to 1727.

The reasons why French Protestants fled their homeland center around Louis XIV's determination that a strong France be one, religiously and politically. This policy, which came to a climax with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, undoubtedly reflected the opinion of most Frenchmen—to tolerate Calvinism was to court national disunity and encourage heresy. Without religious uniformity there was neither social harmony nor political solidarity.

Louis's objective was not expulsion: it was conversion. And he was overwhelmingly successful. By razing Huguenot churches, offering monetary rewards to converts, denying Protestants entry into the legal and other professions, and placing dragoons in their homes, the king forced the great majority to abjure. They preferred to await the dawn of a more tolerant age rather than endure further intimidation or physical harm.

“Resolved by the majority that the Bill of Attainder against the Earl of Strafford should pass as a law.” Thus, on May 7, 1641, the House of Lords enacted that Thomas, Earl of Strafford, should “undergo the pains and forfeitures of high treason by law.”

The passage of the Bill of Attainder against Strafford has subsequently engendered one of the perennial controversies of English political and legal history. On one side of the issue, it is claimed that the answer of the judges and the decision of the Lords were warranted by generally-accepted doctrines of law and constitutional theory. The other side claims that the charges against Strafford had no basis in statute or common law, that the abandonment of the impeachment proves the weakness of the case against the accused, and that in going by way of the Bill, the Commons “slaughtered a man they could not convict.”

Resolution of the controversy over Strafford's case has been hampered by a lack of historical data because at the restoration Charles II ordered all proceedings of the trial to be stricken from the Journals of the House of Lords. The Journal Manuscripts were rendered almost totally unreadable and, as a result, the official record of the trial has been missing for over three hundred years. Until recently, Rushworth has been the main source for histories of the Strafford trial. However, the usefulness of Rushworth has been marred by many lapses and errors, the most significant being that he was absent for several days at the climax of the trial. Consequently, the conclusion of the trial, the proceedings of which would help to resolve the legal controversy, has been reconstructed from fragmentary sources.

On January 4, 1642, Charles I's ill-starred attempt to reassert his authority over Parliament led to the unsuccessful attempt to arrest five of the leading members of the parliamentary opposition on charges of high treason. Three of the men, John Pym, John Hampden, and Denzil Holles, were prominent members of the opposition party, well known to their contemporaries and posterity. The remaining two members, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and William Strode, were less well known to their contemporaries and by and large forgotten by later generations. The Earl of Clarendon quite easily dismissed them as minor figures when he came to write his great history.

Thus were Hesilrige and Strode consigned to the dustbin of history. In Hesilrige's case such treatment did not accord with all the facts as recorded by Clarendon, nor apparently did it coincide with the opinion Charles I held of Hesilrige. The Earl, by his own account of events, leaves little doubt that Hesilrige was capable of doing great mischief although he always preferred to see the knight as the instrument of other men's designs. As for the King, who was fighting to save his ancestral throne, Hesilrige must have appeared as the bitterest of enemies, and it was with good reason that Charles included Hesilrige among the five members.

It is far too early to talk with any real certainty about the mid-nineteenth century electoral structure. The very materials of which it was built are in dispute, let alone the shape of the edifice. A deference school of historians is challenging traditional notions of the growth of political individualism in the period, while so-called quantitative historians are beginning to question the assumptions and approach of both deference historians and traditionalists. Serious and detailed study of the questions involved has hardly begun. Still, some comment on the present state of the controversy may not be entirely out of place. An enduring interpretation can only be constructed of sound materials; and I am by no means certain of the soundness of some of those now being put forward for our use.

W. O. Aydelotte, in a paper read a couple of years ago and soon to be published in a series of essays entitled The History of Parliamentary Behavior, notes the divergence of opinion among historians on the role of the electorate in shaping parliamentary opinion after 1832. As he rightly suggests, Norman Gash in his Politics in the Age of Peel appears to be of two minds on the subject, depending on whether one reads his introduction or his text. In the former Professor Gash stresses the increase of popular influence on Parliament, in the latter the continuance of traditional influences over the mass of the electorate. D. C. Moore comes down heavily on the side of the latter influences, contending that a relatively few leaders of what he has called “deference communities” represented effective electoral opinion, which was simply registered by the mass of the electorate.

One of the largest remaining lacunae in the modern analysis of Great Britain's parliamentary opposition is located in the years between the breakup of the Whig Party in 1794 and the end of Henry Addington's ministry ten years later. From the fall of North's government to their fragmentation in 1794, the whigs have been systematically scrutinized by Professors Christie, Cannon, Mitchell and O'Gorman, while Professors Roberts and Mitchell have provided similar service for the years from the Ministry of All the Talents to the Reform Bill crisis. But the state of the opposition during the years immediately following 1794 has not been extensively considered; in particular, the question of how any opposition managed to survive the traumas of the 1790's has been a subject for suggestion rather than analysis. And yet the question is an important one, if only because the coalition of 1794 is frequently interpreted as having produced a political and ideological alignment which in its main outlines was to dominate British politics until the emergence of the Labour Party. If true—although the geneology of the two-party system remains a productive controversy—this lends an added dimension to the perpetually enlightening study of opposition during the stress of a great war, and to the particular question of how the Foxite rump managed to endure the overwhelming ministerial dominance of the 1790's.

The subject of this essay is a tract written by the noted antiquary, legalist, parliamentarian and sometime courtier, Sir Robert Cotton. Entitled, “Twenty-Four Arguments,” and composed sometime between March, 1617 and early January, 1618, it dealt with the problems posed to the English State and Church by the Roman Catholics and concerned itself, in particular, with the question of whether Popish priests should be executed or imprisoned for life.

The “Twenty-Four Arguments” appeared under that name in the Cottoni Posthuma, a collection of Cotton's writings, published in three editions between 1651 and 1679. However, the first actual publication of this treatise occurred in 1641, when it was put out independently by two printers, each giving it a different title. In addition, it is quite likely that the tract circulated in manuscript before it appeared in printed form.

This brief excursion into the publication history of the “Twenty-Four Arguments” indicates that it was the subject of interest at an important moment in English history. Thus, while admittedly a lesser known and minor work of the period, it is worthy of our consideration. In fact, to the historian the “Twenty-Four Arguments” presents, I think, three important features which make it of real significance. First, it is the product of one of the outstanding lay minds in early seventeenth century England. Sir Robert was, of course, a man of intense learning who displayed a scholar's love for knowledge in his search and accumulation of manuscripts and books, in his concern with antiquities and legal history, and in his close association with such brilliant contemporaries as Sir Francis Bacon and John Selden.

The sequence of events behind the drafting and implementation of British anti-discrimination legislation during the decade of the 1960s is illustrative of the dangers faced by a well-intentioned government seeking to protect minorities by statutory means. Longrange policy planning is difficult to achieve in most sectors of legislative activity, but the protection of basic liberties must be one sector where carefully considered legislation is both essential and attainable. The Labour Government of 1964 to 1970 was intent on protecting the rapidly growing immigrant communities from discrimination—a discrimination based on prejudice against the national and ethnic origins of the immigrants. The “wave” of immigrants of the nineteen fifties was singularly noticeable because of skin-colour: the places of origin of the immigrants being the islands of the West Indies, India, Pakistan, and, to a lesser extent, the former British colonies in West Africa.

Prior to 1971, British immigration legislation was founded on the principles of nationality set forth in the British Nationality Act, 1948. This Act recognised British nationals and British “subjects” or “Commonwealth citizens.” Anyone not fitting into either category (i.e. national or subject) was an alien and the entry of aliens to Britain was controlled by quite separate legislation. British subjects enjoyed (until 1962) all the privileges of British nationality, and herein lay the cause of the “wave” of immigration from the comparatively economically depressed parts of the Commonwealth.

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.

Charles Kingsley complained in 1848, “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere constable's handbook—an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded—a mere book to keep the poor in order.” Kingsley was outraged that religion should be used for the utilitarian purpose of keeping the lower classes in their place. And yet, in most societies religion has traditionally served the very practical purpose of supporting the established social order. To this end the Christian church—and in this regard it is no different than any other institutionalized religion—has preached a social ethic of obedience and submission to the government in power and to the established social order. The church does this by sanctioning a given code of behavior: those people who conform to the prescribed behavioral norm will achieve salvation, while those who fail to conform are ostracized from the religious community and, presumably, are damned. In sociological terms, the code of behavior approved by a given society is most often determined by that society's most influential groups, always with a view (not always conscious or deliberate) of maintaining the groups' dominance. From the point of view of the least influential classes, this didactic function of the church may be seen as an effort at social control, at internal colonialism—in Kinglsey's words, an effort simply to keep the “beasts of burden…, the poor in order.” In terms of biblical imagery the church's didactic function is to separate the sheep from the goats, that is, to set a standard of “respectable” behavior to be followed by the compliant sheep, with probable eternal damnation and temporal punishment for the recalcitrant goats.

In the eighteenth century, most military crimes were tried at the Regimental level. In theory, the military law of the day decreed that the General Courts Martial be reserved for major offenses: those that might result in capital sentences or lashings of great magnitude. Murder, rape, robbery, and other crimes deemed capital undgr eighteenth century civil law, were tried at the General Courts Martial, as were specific military crimes that seriously affected the ongoing life of the armed forces—mutiny, desertion, and the like. As one would expect, there were many more petty crimes than major offenses. Still, the General Courts Martial books show a surprisingly small number of cases, even in wartime, when the army grew precipitously to meet a military threat.

For most soldiers, crime and punishment was administered by the Regimental Courts, yet we know very little about them. There are no Regimental Courts Martial records to speak of and few surviving accounts of their procedures. What we do know suggests that they were very important to those military officers who were responsible for the order and discipline of the British army.

Until 1718, the rules and procedures governing Regimental Courts Martial were vague and uncertain. In that year, a modest attempt was made to codify RCM procedures. It was decreed that the RCM could inflict corporal punishment for such crimes as neglect of duty and disorderly conduct in quarters, among others, and that all such trials had to be conducted by five commissioned officers. Conviction was decided by a plurality of votes. Significantly, the oath, used previously when officers were called upon to serve as judge and jury, was eliminated in Regimental Courts Martial cases. As a result, the Judge Advocate noted some years later, “since that time the Prisoner has not had the benefit of that great and I may say, only security to be fairly and impartially tried.”