“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.

One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in his English Whiggism and the American Revolution (1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to the History of Parliament John Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.

“Patterns sanctified by great historiographic traditions,” wrote J. H. Hexter, “tend to become fixed. Frequently these patterns are neither logical nor coherent, but the sanction of use and wont behind them is so powerful that researchers tend to force new materials into the time-honored model.” This contention is nowhere more manifest than in the historiography of the Puritan Revolution, where studies of religious developments and struggles during the English Civil War indeed reveal a “time honored model” and tend to convey an almost univocal argument concerning the Independents and the rise of the idea of religious toleration. “As early as 1643,” wrote one expert on the issue of toleration, “when the English Parliament was obliged to ally with the Scots in the Solemn League and Covenant … the issue of toleration came to the fore.” Consequently, because “the Presbyterian Scots wished to impose their Calvinist order on England, against the opposition on the parliamentary side of a core of Independents led by Oliver Cromwell and Sir Henry Vane the Younger,” the Independents “became the leading opponents of Presbyterianism and supporters of a general toleration.”

Imagine, if you will, a ship at sea. At a distance, it could be Jason and the Argonauts, or the Flying Dutchman, or even Captain Ahab. By the cut of its jib as it looms out of the mist, however, it seems rather to be a sieve, such as that in which the Jumblies once put forth. On the poop, sextant in hand, his grizzled features set in Churchillian grimace but instantly recognizable by the ancient Connecticut watchcap which tops them, stands—no, not Walter Mitty—but Hexter the Navigator. As a veteran of many earlier voyages, real and imaginary, he has a longer memory than his shipmates. He thinks this is a Liberty Ship, and he is trying to chart the course laid out in the sailing instructions, originally constituted by a long line of sea-lawyers and perfected by Victorian hydrographers. Right forrard, another ancient mariner, of the kind the lower deck calls Three-badge Killick (a leading seaman of long service who has never made it to Petty Officer), swings the lead. He is Plumb. In the crow's nest, bo'suns Tawney and Hill stand watch with their mates Stone and Thompson. As boy seamen long ago, they, too, were brought up on the old sailing instructions; but having, before the present voyage, served in capital ships, they consider that they have progressed far beyond such common lore. So wise are they indeed that they are convinced that this, too, is a Capital Ship, which, as everybody knows, can only sail forwards, and can therefore have only one destination. In the rigging, the rest of the fo'csle hands, a rabble of cabin boys and greenhorns press-ganged in 1968, who have barely passed for able seaman and still need the old guard to show them the ropes, likewise scan the horizon for the inevitable landfall and keep a weather eye open for that ill-omened denizen of these waters, Namier's Albatross. The intrepid helmsman, however, just as young but experienced beyond his years, knows better. Apprenticed to a line of tars that stretches back to old admiral Clarendon, he has learnt his craft the hard way, at the rope's end, and he has very little use for the sailing instructions of Liberty Ships or the great circle routes programmed, rhumb line by reductionist rhumb line, into the automatic pilots of their capital counterparts. He is Revisionist, a most unteleologic Ulysses, content (the journey not Ithaca's the thing) to sail his narrative barque (Narrenschiff?) before the winds of change for ever. Only one thing jars this whimsical homeric simile. Proof though he is against Circe and her reifications, our Ulysses has still his achilles' heel. Perhaps because he has come up through the hawse-hole himself, he has occasional bouts of nautical nostalgie de la boue: like Bertram, the sociologist of the sea in “Dry Cargo,” the Navigator's hoary parable on Doing History (another time, another voyage), he itches to pull on a pair of footnotes, go below and sample the bilgewater which, this being after all a sieve, slops around the hold.

Mary made the unfortunate mistake of antagonizing her successor, without being able to impose any limitations upon her freedom of action. Writing in 1557 the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michieli, observed “although it is dissembled, it cannot be denied that [the queen] displays in many ways the scorn and ill will she bears her [Elizabeth]….” The younger woman reciprocated such feelings in full measure, and a few days before her accession, when there was no longer any need to be discreet, the Count of Feria reported, “She is highly indignant about what has been done to her in the queen's lifetime….” Such personal antagonism may not go far in explaining Elizabeth's decision to reverse so many of her sister's policies, but it certainly helps to account for the animus that the new queen's most trusted servants so quickly developed against their predecessors. In the last days of 1558 a royal commission was issued “to discover by what means the realm hath suffered great harm” under the previous regime, and soon came up with a long list of secular and ecclesiastical grants. Most of the latter were immediately resumed in the succeeding Parliament. It was to be another quarter of a century before Elizabeth finally emerged as the winner, and Mary as the loser, of the English reformation struggle, but those in power after 1558 did not wait to celebrate their victory.

In 1462, in defense of the House of Lancaster, Sir John Fortescue wrote that Edward IV could not cure the king's evil, the disease scrofula, by touching the afflicted since to do so one must not only be a king but also a legitimate one. To touch one needed not only to be annointed with holy oil but the person must also be the legitimate heir. Lancastrians claimed that Edward IV could not touch since he was not the rightful king. Wrote Fortescue, he “wrongly claims to enjoy this wonderful privilege. Wrongly … [because] this unction is powerless because Edward had no right to receive it.” Sir John goes on to argue by analogy, and scornfully asks: “Would a woman who received ordination thereby become a priest?” Of course not. Continuing this line of argument, Fortescue adds that a usurper would not be the only one unable to cure by touch.

The effects of the intense personal and political relationship between the young George III and his “dearest friend,” the earl of Bute, are well known to scholars of eighteenth-century Britain. The prince's affection and respect raised Bute, an obscure though well-connected Scottish nobleman, to the highest offices of state and to the absolute pinnacle of power. The earl's instruction and advice governed George's reactions to men and measures from 1755 until 1763. Even after Bute's influence waned following his resignation as First Lord of the Treasury, the lingering suspicions at Whitehall and Westminster that the king still listened to him in preference to others complicated relations between George III, his ministers, and Parliament.

This article examines the origins of the friendship between the king and the earl, and the features of it that strengthened and preserved their attachment during the 1750s. These are questions that have not engaged the attention of many students of the period. The long shadow the relationship cast over politics during the 1760s has intrigued far more historians than its beginnings. They have been content to leave efforts to understand that subject to Sir Lewis Namier, who was inclined toward making psychological judgments of eighteenth-century politicians, and John Brooke, who was compelled to do so by the demands of writing a biography of George III. Both of these men asserted that the personal and affectionate aspects of the connection between the prince and Bute far outweighed the political and ideological during its early years. Their arguments have evidently convinced historians of politics to pass over what made Bute “my dearest friend” and press on to matters they assumed to be more relevant to their interests. The concern of this essay is to demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect. It will show that political and ideological considerations were in fact utterly crucial to this friendship at its inception and throughout its development during the 1750s, with consequences which profoundly affected the political history of the first decade of George III's reign. A mistaken reliance on works by Namier and Brooke has prevented scholars from perceiving these realities. Thus it is necessary to begin by pointing out the serious flaws in their interpretations.

“He that stoppeth his Ears at the Cry of the Poor, he also shall cry and not be heard” was the warning of Thomas Lawson to Parliament at the time of Charles II's restoration to the English throne in 1660. Lawson, a Quaker school teacher and notable botanist, addressed his special appeal for poor relief to the Restoration Parliament. He, like other Quaker leaders of his day, urged those in authority “let not a Settlement for the Poor be forgotten.” The Quaker movement drew its members from a cross section of the social orders of seventeenth-century England, including a significant number of poor from the lower orders. Although appeals for poor relief were not unique to the Quakers, Thomas Law-son expressed a typical Quaker viewpoint of social obligation to the impecunious. The Quakers consistently addressed the problem of poor relief within their community in practical terms from their earliest organization in 1652.

The history of the long reign of George III has recently been shaken by a vigorous and determined revisionism. A temblor of this magnitude has not been felt since Sir Lewis Namier mounted his prosopographical revolution more than half a century ago. Indeed, it has been suggested that J. C. D. Clark's English Society actually will surpass the influence of Namier's Structure of Politics. If so, it is difficult to imagine the combined impact of English Society, Rebellion and Revolution, The Dynamics of Change, The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, the host of articles already published, and the plethora of words certain to be typeset in the relatively near future.

Perhaps Clark's relentless torrent of prose will relegate to the historiographical scrap heap virtually all existing scholarship about the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in favor of his corrected model of Hanoverian England. Already Clark claims that the standard account depicting eighteenth-century England as “an economically progressive society, increasingly secular and individualist in its ethos and distinctively demarcated from its European contemporaries” is, quite simply, “no longer tenable.” Clark's most recent pronouncement declares that “the revisionists’ [i.e. his] views of the period now command widespread acceptance.” The revisionist view cannot be fairly summarized in a single statement (though the phrases “ancien regime” and “confessional state” both manage nicely to encompass a great deal), but a passage Clark cites to illustrate England at the death of George III serves as a point of departure.

In the decade preceding the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Muscovite Russia went through a catastrophic period known as the Time of Troubles which was characterized by political unrest, famine, regicide, social upheaval, and foreign intervention. In the final, darkest years of the Time of Troubles many people doubted that Muscovy, which for a time lacked a ruler or even a central government, would be able to survive as an independent state. It appeared more likely that Catholic Poland would conquer the country or that Sweden would come to dominate it. The English, who had established diplomatic and commercial relations with Muscovy in the 1550s and who watched events there with considerable interest, were horrified by reports that the Poles had captured Moscow, that the Swedes had seized much Russian territory, and that factions of the Muscovite lords were negotiating with their aggressive neighbors for a foreign tsar. This eventually led the English to contemplate acquiring North Russia and the commercially important port of Arkhangel'sk for themselves. As strange as it seems, for a brief period of time King James I actually dreamed of adding part of Muscovy to his “empire.”

When Keith Thomas wrote “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” he could not ignore the so-called Marprelate Tracts, which are famous lampoons on Queen Elizabeth's bishops. But they are a problem, because they are examples of what can only be termed Puritan humor. No one yet has described them as the work of a “funny Puritan.” Those words repel each other. So we usually say they were the work of a “Puritan sympathizer.” Funny Puritans don't exist, almost by definition. Professor Thomas searched for an acceptable expression and finally dismissed the episode—seven pamphlets which have been called “The best prose satires of Elizabeth's reign”—as “bizarre.” In his view, then, it is all simply inexplicable, and he hastens to assure readers that “not only the Church but also its Puritan opponents condemned Martin [the pseudonymous “Martin Marprelate”] for treating the matter with such levity.” Here we have the Puritans we know and love, the ones whom H. L. Mencken defined as those who live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

But English Puritan literature for children reveals other anomalies in this characterization. Puritans and (after 1660) “Dissenters” wrote a great deal for children, more than any other group in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of it is tedious if not downright grim, including some of their attempts at humor. But much of it was intended to give pleasure. The purpose of this article is to look into the strangely neglected subject of Puritan humor through the prism of their works for the entertainment of children.

In the annals of nineteenth-century Ireland, few disputes between public figures have been more rancorous or more significant than the fight that began in 1848 between two seemingly like-minded journalists, Charles Gavan Duffy and John Mitchel. In the mid-1840s, Duffy and Mitchel were colleagues on the most influential nationalist newspaper in Irish history, the Nation. But in 1847, relations between the two men became strained, and Mitchel resigned to start his own, more radical, paper. The former friends and colleagues soon became the bitterest of enemies. Their public quarrels over the next few years severely damaged each man's personal reputation — and also damaged the Irish nationalist cause in which each so fervently believed.

Unlike many running Irish feuds, which merely exacerbate old stereotypes about the Gaels being a fractious race, the Mitchel-Duffy controversy haddirect political fallout at a critical point in the development of political separatism in Ireland. The quarrel erupted just when Irish nationalists had an unusual opportunity to bring enormous pressure to bear on the British House of Commons. The Tory party of the 1840s had been shattered, first by Sir Robert Peel's turnabout on free trade in 1846, and then by Peel's death four years later. The modern idea of nearly automatic, lifelong adhesion to strong central parties was still some years off, and the two major British parties were scrambling for friends.

Any model of English society during the “long” eighteenth century whether briefly characterized as an ancien regime or a confessional state must rest on some consideration of its seventeenth-century antecedents, and include some account of how and why a quite different historiography was worked out in the nineteenth century. Similarly, any critique, to be fully effective, would need to range as widely in time and theme. The preceding articles by James Bradley, John Money, and John Phillips offer useful challenges to part of the wider thesis but so far lack a broad perspective. This in itself focusses attention on my own books at the expense of those of my colleagues. The historiographical element in my work has made explicit my indebtedness to the many other scholars whose research over three centuries of British history is congruent with my own: only that restricted horizon which limits some enquiries to one or two decades could lead critics to fail to do justice to what is, after all, the work of a generation of authors and not one of “revisionist” alone.

It is because the new thinking which I addressed has been the product of a diverse generation of scholars rather than of a “school” of “revisionists” (let alone of an individual) that the restatements of an old orthodoxy have been so few. There has been no general counter-attack on the “revisionists,” and no alternative synoptic vision of the English past which remotely looks as if it could be a blueprint either for a revival of the old history or for some quite new vision. Replies have tried instead to defend some part of the old model on increasingly restricted ground. It has been suggested, for example, that “meaningful popular politics” can indeed be found in the borough of Maidstone in the late eighteenth century; but such an argument can only be sustained by not attending to the reasons which made Maidstone, and a few boroughs like it, unusual. Here as elsewhere, the pattern of response has been to defend a previous thesis by narrowing the frame of reference chronologically or geographically, searching for one area at least where it can be made to fit.

William Cobbett is a problem figure in English history. Among his several stage credits are his performances as the soldier's friend, the champion of the rural laborers and the parliamentary leader of the common people. During the 1810s and 1820s he took his celebrated rural rides for the purpose of discovering first-hand the wants and needs of the country laborers. He voiced their “cottage charter” in the Political Register, he composed hundreds of tracts disseminating their reform program, and in 1830 he led them in the Captain Swing disturbances—the laborers' militant campaign for improved wages, full employment, and the return to the cottage of bacon, beer, and wheaten bread.

Cobbett's sympathies for the farm workers have long been a subject of observation among historians and literary critics. Matthew Arnold suggested that Cobbett's politics were regulated by the condition of country workers, while Hugh Egerton described Cobbett as “the one eminent author whom the farm labourers of England can claim as their own.” For Leslie Stephen, Cobbett was “the voice of the English peasant,” for J. B. Morton he was “the peasant articulate,” and for G. K. Chesterton he “spoke for those innumerable who are also inarticulate.” The great biographer of Cobbett, G. D. H. Cole, agreed: Cobbett was a politicized peasant “at one in nature and sentiment with the mass which he aspired to lead.” Unlike the previous commentators, Cole developed his argument at some length, but his primary understanding of Cobbett was as a rustic-minded critic of industrialism and high finance—a valid assessment certainly, but one neglectful of Cobbett's self-professed ignorance of industrial labor and of market economy.

The history of British continuing education has been written almost entirely as institutional history. The impact of the 1924 Board of Education regulations on the funding of adult classes has been thoroughly examined, and we know a good deal about the various district secretaries of the Workers' Educational Association. But we have yet to tackle a set of more fundamental and revealing questions about the WEA: Who were the students? Why did they enroll in WEA courses? What were their intellectual goals? What cultural equipment did they bring to their classes? What went on inside the classroom? Most importantly, how, if at all, did the WEA change the lives and minds of its students?

This article focuses on a controversy that erupted shortly after the WEA was launched in 1903, and which persists today: a question that can only be resolved by studying WEA students at close range. According to a number of Marxist critics, the WEA played an important role in steering the British working class away from Marxism. Roger Fieldhouse argues that the WEA'S emphasis on objective scholarship and open-mindedness “could have the effect of neutralising some students' commitments or beliefs and integrating them into the hegemonic national culture.”

Within the last generation there has been a vast outpouring of scholarship on the characteristics of British imperial policy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The older orthodoxy that the mid-Victorian years were dominated by a commitment to laissez faire and free trade has been demolished. In the new era scholars quarrel over how “imperial” was “informal empire.” This article is not intended to add to this controversy, but rather to provide insight into the character of British policy in one area, Persia, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on American efforts to build railways and British responses to this attempted intrusion into an exclusive British-Russian sphere of influence.

For both Russia and Britain Persia had great strategic significance. Like Afghanistan, “the walls of the Indian garden,” Persia was important primarily in relation to the defense of the Indian Empire. Russian expansion to the borders of Persia, a weak state, posed the threat that the country would fall under Russian influence and what had been a buffer would become a menace.

British interest in Persia thus involved a strong strategic component which affected economic policy. Unlike Afghanistan it was seen as a promising market for British goods, particularly if transportation to the interior of Persia could be opened up on the Karun River and if British capital could be attracted to build a network of railways which could be a further basis for controlling the Persian economy and thus contributing to British influence at the Persian court. At the same time Britain was determined to thwart Russian plans for railways in the north which could be used to transport troops to the borders of Persia and eventually beyond. Each power assumed the malevolent intent of the other and each was determined to frustrate these foul plans.