Various scholars have discussed, for particular elections, the court's role as an electoral patron. However, their work has, of necessity, left unanswered several significant questions about such patronage. It is clear that, by the elections of 1640, issues of a more “national” importance had a strong impact on the success or failure of the court's electioneering. But the questions remain. Were the elections of 1640 unique or can traces of such agitation over matters of more than local concern be found in earlier elections? And did the issues of early Stuart politics, religious reform, the alleged growth of recusant sympathies, the foreign policies followed by James I and Charles I, and the financial expedients practiced by Charles I, have any significant effect on the court's electoral influence? Perhaps, by reviewing the influence of the Lord Wardens of the Cinque Ports between 1604 and 1628, a few answers may be suggested and a clearer picture of the electoral practices of the court may emerge.

England's traditional bridge to Europe, the Cinque Ports — a misleading title since there were actually seven — held fast to their special privileges, their own unique organization, franchise and courts. They returned fourteen burgesses, or “barons” as they were uniquely called, to parliament. The Lord Warden, however, enjoyed considerable influence over them. He was Constable of Dover Castle, his administrative headquarters, and acted as a sheriff for the ports, which were outside county jurisdiction. More importantly, the Lord Warden was the voice of the Cinque Ports at court.

Contemporary perspectives on the activities of English medieval ships and mariners are somewhat distorted, since historians are rarely able to examine mercantile or marine activity from the personal records of merchants, mariners, shipbuilders, corderers, or others involved in maritime affairs. The sources are overwhelmingly royal and so they reduce the individual efforts of men and their ships to entries of income and expenditures in exchequer records, commissions of arrest or impressment, legal briefs, and occasional parliamentary records. The chroniclers prove of little help because of their general unfamiliarity with maritime affairs or because of the restricted interests of their patrons. Consequently, historians are forced to revert to the well-preserved English archival material which can shed light on the topic. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of the administrative records of medieval England in the study of ships and mariners. The focus of the essay is on the early history of the royal navy as opposed to the merchant ships impressed by the crown. Although this approach is not unique, questions regarding the composition, maintenance, or manning of royal fleets are traditionally answered by a discussion of the merchant marine. This study has been confined to the fourteenth century — a period crucial to the English experience because of the origins of the Hundred Years' War with France and the demands which the war placed upon the naval resources of England.

English fleets in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relied heavily upon the Cinque Ports whose commitment of 57 ships for 15 days' service per year was formalized in the thirteenth century by “ancient custom.”

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.

This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.

Two of the most common manifestations of social tension in Tudor England were the enclosure riot and the seditious rumor. Both are essentially pre-political forms of social protest, but the first must be viewed as more primitive than the second. Enclosure riots, at least prior to the riots and rebellions of 1548-49, were not particularly directed against the governing elite, but rather were aimed at innovations which threatened the traditional agrarian routine within the manorial or village economy. Thus, enclosure riots, which were procured as frequently by gentry as by peasants and often were calculatingly combined with litigation, did not especially menace the social order. On the other hand, seditious rumors — particularly those that were threatening and anonymous — raised the possibility of social polarization and violent protest on a larger scale than that of the enclosure riot. Before the rebellions and riots of 1548-49, enclosure riots were almost invariably confined within a single village community or between two neighboring communities, but during those troubled years the wide-spread circulation of rumors threatening the gentry resulted in the destruction over a widely-scattered area of enclosing hedges which had stood unchallenged for generations.

The rumor as a vehicle of social protest could either express the collective fear that some supposedly hostile group such as the rural aristocracy had put together a conspiracy to harm the peasantry, or could, conversely, convey the desire of peasants and artisans for social levelling or even social inversion.

Late eighteenth-century London was a center of political debate, expressed variously in countless pamphlets, in coffee house discussions, and in extra-parliamentary political organizations. Intellectuals and political activists who argued about the problems of ministerial corruption and relations with the colonies had great faith in the power of reasoned discourse and the development of knowledge to improve the human condition. Most of them were interested in science and religion as well as politics. They were part of that broad intellectual ferment that we call the Enlightenment; yet for all the originality of some of their ideas and the radicalism of their political thinking, they owed a great deal to longstanding English political and religious traditions. They were rationalists who believed in God, and radicals who believed in history.

Catharine Macaulay was one of these intellectuals; she was surely not a particularly original thinker, but was unique in using history as her primary medium of political debate, and in being a woman tolerated in male intellectual circles. Macaulay and her associates owed a great intellectual debt to earlier radical thinkers, the “commonwealthmen” of the seventeenth century. What is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which their ideas were informed by religious beliefs as well as political ideology. Beliefs in both the ancient rights of Englishmen and in millennial perfectionism provided the basis for the particular brand of political radicalism espoused by Macaulay and her associates. History was an important part of their political thinking, both because the rights of Englishmen were rooted in historical experience and because the process of history was part of the ultimate achievement of perfection.

Students of the industrial revolution now generally admit what seemed obvious to Samuel Garbett, the Birmingham manufacturer and lobbyist, two hundred years ago; namely, that the state was an important participant in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Many scholars still emphasize the restraint of English government — a restraint which gave relatively free play to natural economic forces and to individual genius, a restraint which also aggravated the social repercussions of so momentous a transformation. But they recognize that entrepreneurs could obtain legal sanction for enclosures, canals, and a myriad of other “improvements' easily and at moderate cost by means of a private act of parliament, and they debate whether existing patent law stimulated invention by providing adequate rewards for the inventor or aimed primarily at discouraging stultifying monopoly. Because the processes of growth in the last decades of the century were so fundamental and pervasive, fiscal, commercial, colonial, and foreign policies were bound to have an impact on the embryonic industrial economy. Whether government by its various acts encouraged or impeded growth is open to debate at a number of levels. There can be no doubt, however, that politicians endeavored, if sometimes slowly and haphazardly, to adapt policy and law to changing conditions and that their decisions did affect the tempo and quality of growth.

By 1648 in England many of parliament's supporters believed that peace was as far away as ever. The members of parliament who had declared they were fighting to rescue the king from the hands of his evil counsellors may have rethought their views about the personal responsibility of the king, but they still believed that the only viable settlement would be one based upon agreement between king and parliament. Consequently they had dispatched, with wearisome monotony, negotiators and messengers with propositions for peace to the king. Their initiatives were always destroyed in the last resort because Charles refused the terms offered, but apart from governing without him for the time being, the members of parliament could think of nothing else but a settlement based on agreement with Charles. The political thinking of the majorities in both Houses was bound by convention: a king was essential. Outside parliament, pamphleteers had questioned the importance of the king, but parliament's view was not seriously threatened until 1647 when it showed itself incapable of settling the kingdom and the Army showed a willingness to intervene in politics. The outbreak of the second Civil War in 1648 convinced the soldiers that parliament's policies of either seeking terms with the king or of ignoring him were alike futile and dangerous. So long as Charles remained alive, at the center of royalist hopes, so long would wars continue and lives be lost. At this point the Army spoke of the king in a new way.

In 1819 Viscount Castlereagh, England's Foreign Secretary and perhaps the most hated member of the Government, complained in parliament that the journalist, T. J. Wooler (1786?-1853), had become “the fugleman of the Radicals.” His weekly journal The Black Dwarf was circulating from radical Westminster to northern colliery districts, where it could be found “in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you meet.”

Early nineteenth-century popular radicalism took form in its journalism and its political tracts, pamphlet satires, caricatures, posters, and ballads. The best of the radical publications were shaped in turn by traditional popular attitudes and forms, including the rich resources of popular humor. Wooler's writing was unmistakably political, and often earnest in the manner of the polemical journalism of William Cobbett and Richard Carlile or the oratory of Henry Hunt. But his favorite tone was satirical, and this made him prominent among those radicals who did the most in the late Regency years to promote a public attitude of anti-authoritarianism rather than deference, of contempt for an unjust government rather than fear of it. E. P. Thompson has shown that it was “not the solemnity but the delight” with which the radicals “baited authority” that made the old order vulnerable. Wooler's journalism is a fine example of the political uses of popular humor, and a key to understanding the distinctive character of Regency radical culture.

I

Regency radicalism was a mixture of traditional and Enlightenment political ideas of natural rights and freedoms and an emerging class-consciousness of economics and society.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the honour to announce a sale of many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles. Here you will find objects of taste, such as Babies' Shoes, Children's Petticoats, and Shetland Wool Cravats; objects of general usefulness, such as Tea-cosies, Bangles, Brahmin Beads, and Madras Baskets; and objects of imperious necessity, such as Pen-wipers, Indian Figures carefully repaired with glue, and Sealed Envelopes, containing a surprise. And all this is not to be sold by your common Shopkeepers, intent on small and legitimate profits, but by Ladies and Gentlemen, who would as soon think of picking your pocket of a cotton handkerchief, as of selling a single one of these many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles at less than twice its market value.

Spoken amidst trumpet flourishes by Robert Louis Stevenson's “allegorical Tout,” these words introduce an institution familiar to all of us and one full of interest to the social historian — the charity bazaar. Tea-cosies, bangles, Brahmin beads, and Madras baskets may seem only quaint and comical, but they and similar trifles filled countless stalls in innumerable bazaars and raised tens of millions of pounds in nineteenth-century England for causes of every conceivable description. Men and women of all social classes found bazaars, fancy fairs, fancy sales, or ladies' sales as they were variously called, a most popular and fashionable way of making money for the charity of their choice. Many philanthropic societies depended on them for annual funds. Clergymen of all persuasions, not without a touch of compromise, looked to them as a last resort to build a church or to enlarge a school or drawing room.

The education of working-class children was a major governmental concern during the age of Peel and Cobden. In this period the state's financial commitment grew from £30,000 to £125,000, and a new department of state — the Education Committee of the Privy Council, with its bureaucratic establishment, the Education Department — was created to direct central policy. But who made that policy? Who guided education reform into channels which still, to some extent, contained the British educational establishment a century later? And does this example of Victorian reform suggest the dynamics of state intervention in other fields up to then left to private enterprise?

Civil servants, it has been alleged, were the responsible agents of change in this area. James Kay-Shuttleworth, the Education Department's first permanent secretary, has today a reputation as great as Chadwick's or Trevelyan's among historians. Henry Parris believes that he “organized” the department and made its policy; he calls his retirement in 1849 perhaps “the greatest single misfortune in the country's educational history.” David Roberts calls him “the chief architect of England's educational system;” he attributes to him all major government education policy between 1846 and 1849. That policy “came from the mind of a man who possessed not only a clear view of the ends which he wished to attain but also a sense of the possible means to those ends….” George Kitson Clark contended that his “services to public education have probably never been properly valued.”

Late Victorian and Edwardian social reform has been studied in recent years in order to clarify that important transitional era when new state resources were being called upon to help redress the most glaring abuses which comprised the condition-of-England question. Most of these studies have emphasized the politics of social policy and have also subsumed the tangled and competitive world of philanthropy. But philanthropists were prominent in the politics and practice of social welfare. In his study of Edwardian social policy, Bentley Gilbert distinguishes three organizations as characteristic of “scientific social reform”: settlements (inspired by Canon Samuel Barnett), the Fabians, and the Charity Organization Society. His analysis of each concluded that “professionally-minded social work,” as represented by the C.O.S., least typified the transition from old to new attitudes about social policy. David Owen's examination of English philanthropy supports Gilbert's conclusions concerning the C.O.S., and less detailed surveys of social policy also cite that agency as representative of a philosophic individualism which rejected the policies necessary for reform. All agree that the charitable community called attention to many defects in the British social system, but they leave readers with the impression that it generally opposed state sponsored remedies for those ills.

It is the concern of this essay to show that the “professionally-minded” world of Edwardian philanthropy was, like the state, developing new agencies and reorganizing its resources to help meet the massive and diverse welfare needs of the twentieth century.

W. E. Gladstone resigned twice as leader of the Liberal Party. His final retirement of 1894 has received much attention, but his resignation two decades earlier is not well known. At age sixty-five, the recent loser in a surprise general election, the former prime minister stepped down from the Liberal leadership in January, 1875. Some observers doubted the permanence of his retirement, but previous speculation about the Liberal succession had assumed that Gladstone could hope at most for one further premiership. After he regained the leadership in 1880 and soldiered on as the Grand Old Man at the head of three further governments, Liberal sympathizers dismissed his 1875 resignation in retrospect as an unrevealing mistake, a temporary meandering from the true path of his career.

Recent studies have pointed to the decisive importance of Gladstone's course in the 1870s, especially to the implications of his return to public life. R. T. Shannon ties Gladstone's resignation to his loss of rapport with the popular forces that had once rallied to the banners of Reform and Irish disestablishment. His government's rejection at the polls in 1874 seemed to end “his great romance with the people of England.” Bitter, disillusioned, and mystified about the popular verdict, he resigned his post as Liberal leader. Freed from parliamentary responsibilities, Gladstone went on, almost in spite of his conscious intentions, to capture the soul of popular Liberalism, beginning with his hesitant but inspiring participation in the 1876 agitation against the Bulgarian atrocities, a campaign which held few attractions for the official Liberal hierarchy.

The term “backwoodsmen” originated in the rhetoric of an embattled Liberal Government intent on discrediting an overwhelmingly Unionist House of Lords during the struggle over the “People's Budget” of 1909. The description applied to those peers, supposedly the great majority of the Upper Chamber, who almost never attended debates and had nothing to do with national affairs. The “diehards”, the 112 temporal peers who voted against the Parliament Bill of 1911, have been characterized by both their contemporaries and later historians as conforming to the “backwoodsmen” stereotype. This politically motivated description of the “diehards” has been accepted as substantially accurate since it was first formulated. It is a prime example of a received historical “truth” repeated by many historians, but left uninvestigated.

Like other clichés used by historians, this characterization of the diehards as “backwoodsmen” has hindered the effort to understand the politics and society of the period in question. As Lord Willoughby de Broke, a prominent diehard, stated in his autobiography, the result of contemporary and later comment has been that “backwoodsmen” have “occupied a special niche in the public vision. They were presented as being a rare and rudimentary species of the human race.” The study of the diehards, believed to be composed of members of this odd species, has been perfunctory at best. For if the group is thought to be almost completely divorced from national politics and affairs, perhaps by its own choice, and if it is further thought to behave either simply in terms of landed reaction or as the willing tool of the Unionist leadership, further analysis would seem to be both unnecessary and unproductive for the understanding of modern British society.

After John Buchan, Nevil Shute. In the long progression of popular British writers who have woven stories around the social facts and cultural values of empire, a progression which extends from Charles Kingsley and G. A. Henty through Paul Scott and, arguably, Ian Fleming, Nevil Shute occupies a distinguishable and important place. Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt. This essay offers the elements of such an analysis and suggests some lines along which further inquiry might proceed.

For at least a decade before his death in January 1960, Nevil Shute had been the best selling of English novelists. Altogether, his nearly two dozen works of light fiction have sold over 14 million copies. When he died his books were earning him an income of about $175,000 a year. Such extended popularity can hardly have been fortuitous. Without venturing too far into the psychology of literary response, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shute must have gauged accurately the issues and situations which, imaginatively presented, would interest his readers, and further, that he must have expressed in his work a pattern of values which conformed generally to their moral predispositions (or at least did not offend them.) Hence it should prove worthwhile to take a close and comprehensive look at his themes and ideas on the premise that they can tell us something useful about his audience.