In a journalistic career which spanned seven decades, Henry Noel Brailsford devoted a considerable part of his writing to Russian affairs and to the relations of the British and Russian peoples. In scores of articles and in two books based on first-hand observations, he helped to mold Western attitudes — especially of those on the political Left — to the often maligned, frequently enigmatic giant of the East. Few English journalists in the twentieth century could match the knowledge, personal contacts, and audience of a man who published several articles a week from the late 1890s to the early 1950s for a host of papers, including, to name the most important, the Manchester Guardian, the Speaker, the Daily News, the Nation, the Herald, the New Republic, the New Leader, Reynolds News, and the New Statesman. While Brailsford's field of competence encompassed the whole range of international and imperial affairs, he was preoccupied with the Balkans, with Russia, and with India, and of these only Russia commanded his attention throughout his life. The Balkan question belongs to the years before World War I, India to the 1930s and 1940s, but Russia remained of consuming interest from the revolution of 1905 until after the Second World War.

It has long been an established part of the Cromwellian legend that some time during the 1630's Oliver Cromwell made the decision to abandon England in favor of a fresh start in the New World but was prevented from doing so by the government of Charles I. There is evidence that among the Puritan leaders he was not alone in this resolve. What were the motives that led such men to consider leaving England? How serious were they? Why were their plans not carried out? This essay will examine the case of Sir Arthur Hesilrige about whom sufficient evidence exists to allow us to supply the answers to some basic questions about the Puritan leaders' intended emigration to New England.

Sir Arthur Hesilrige, the second son of Sir Thomas Hesilrige, baronet of Nosely, was born in 1601. His family, an ancient and prosperous member of the landed gentry, possessed the manor of Nosely in Leicestershire and had extensive holdings and connections in Northumberland, the county of their origin. Little is known of his early life. He was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge and at Gray's Inn where he may well have met several future parliamentarians and Cromwellians with whom he was later to associate. In 1624 upon completion of his education he married Frances Elmes, the daughter of Thomas Elmes, a Northhampshire gentleman. Six years later in January, 1630, upon his father's death, Arthur succeeded to the baronetcy and the estates, his elder brother having preceded his father in death.

World War I brought about a crisis within the British Liberal Party for it confronted Liberals with issues which they found difficult to resolve on the basis of traditional liberal principles. On numerous occasions, Liberals were placed in situations in which they were forced to choose between liberal principles and illiberal measures which were necessary for the effective prosecution of the war. The dilemma of whether or not to support British involvement in the war was a painful one which many Liberals would have preferred to avoid, and it was followed by other scarcely less painful decisions involving conscription, the extension of state controls over the economy, freedom of expression and personal liberties, the future of free trade, the right to refuse military service on the ground of conscientious objection, and the larger problem of whether to seek military victory or a negotiated peace.

The effect of the war on those Radical Liberal intellectuals who comprised an important segment of the left-wing of the Liberal Party was especially profound. Although they were not a highly organized group before 1914, there did exist a number of Radical Liberals who were bound together by their common agreement on the overriding importance of a “pacifistic” foreign policy and additional measures of social reform. This loose coalition of Radical Liberals was shattered by the war, for a large proportion of the group supported the war while others did not. Moreover, the issues generated by the war tended to drive the dissenting Radicals further to the Left, while the conservative assumptions of pro-war Radical Liberals became more prominent. By the end of the war the gulf between the two factions of Radical Liberals had become a deep chasm, and in the post-war years the division became a permanent one; many of those who had been dissenters during the war joined the Labour Party, while pro-war Radical Liberals tended either to remain in the Liberal Party or adopt an independent position.

What is “protest”? Who is a protester and who is not? This is a problem that has bothered me ever since I began, about ten years ago, to try to sort out the social and political protesters from the rest of the convicts transported to Australia from the late 18th century to the 1860s. To some this is no particular problem at all. Criminologists and writers on crime and punishment - such as Leon Radzinowicz, J. J. Tobias and Nigel Walker (to cite the most recent) - have tended to place protest, when they have dealth with it at all, under such omnibus labels as crimes against property and crimes against persons. Others have eluded such refinements altogether and have argued that if protest is a social phenomenon, so is crime, and how can one sensibly draw a distinction between the rebel against society and the man whom society drives, or appears to drive, to crime? So it has been claimed that all convicts, whether they were transported or hot, were the victims of a society that left them out in the cold; and there is some justice in the claim (was it made by the Hammonds?) that in a society like Britain's in the early nineteenth century there was a large measure of culpability in common between the cattle-maimer or urban thief and the magistrate or High Court judge who sent them to a penitentiary at home or to the convict-jails of Van Diemen's Land or Sydney Cove.

It may be assumed that a bibliographical survey of a period of history is likely to reveal the nature, strengths and weaknesses of its historiography. This assumption depends to a large extent on the historical rather than bibliographical knowledge which the bibliographer brings to his work. So I would begin by pointing out two things which mere bibliography does not reveal about Victorian historiography. One is the influence upon it of works dealing with earlier, pre-Victorian periods. In any list of the ten most important works for the Victorian historian, one must include Namier's Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class. Whatever one may think of these works, they are methodologically or ideologically seminal. A second thing not easily revealed by bibliography is the relative styles and types of work done in the United States as distinct from the United Kingdom. The British are more likely to write essays and biographies, and they have a near monopoly of social history; Americans, as everybody knows, are dreadfully monographic; as everybody may not know, they seem to have taken the lead in the field of intellectual history, perhaps because one may more readily depend on printed sources.

I should next like to venture some remarks about the relative importance of particular genres in Victorian historiography. The most obvious is that editions of printed sources are of rather less importance for so modern a period of history. Percentage figures are deceptive, however, because Parliamentary Papers and the periodical press are too numerous to be cited individually, and autobiographies and other contemporary works could only be cited sparingly. Thus, while the preparation of printed sources is only a small part of the work done in Victorian history, the actual amount of available printed sources is in fact overwhelming. To this must be added the increasing availability of such sources in microform or photoreproduction, which may well transform historical research. Another observation relevant to genres of historical writing is the much larger prominence of biography in the Victorian field. The taste for biography is itself a Victorian phenomenon, and in certain fields—I have elsewhere discussed its role in religious history— this genre may be unduly prominent, often resulting in a narrowly personalistic approach. Nonetheless, the monograph still dominates the field.

The investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales was a magnificently staged pageant, as most of the 500 million people who saw it on television will attest. Two hundred thousand pounds went into the making of the extravaganza of July 1, 1969, an event that Queen Elizabeth had promised to her Welsh subjects as far back as 1958, at the close of the Commonwealth Games at Cardiff. But no date had been set for the Caernarvon investiture until July 1, 1967. Predictably, the timing of that announcement has been seen as politically motivated, as a direct response to the emergence of Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) as a threat in two recent by-elections in Wales.

The investiture ceremony was itself a matter of much contention within Wales. Most Welshmen, to the distaste, even disgust, of the minority separatists, welcomed the event: as a royal occasion, a boost to tourism, and as a state celebration in which they, as Welshmen, were to take pride of place. It was to cost too much, true, but then the Welsh are not alone in questioning the cost of maintaining Royalty. And it is true that Charles was an English prince, but he had behaved himself admirably while a student at University College, Aberystwyth, and had even learned some Welsh during his stay in the Principality. He was, in that respect, the first “English” prince of Wales to identify himself with the Welsh in so intimate and endearing a way. Some memories on that July day, 1969, were directed to the first “English” Prince of Wales, a baby son of Edward I who was born at Caernarvon in 1301 and presented to the Welsh as their prince to replace the defeated Llywelyn. Edward II, it turns out, not only grew up to speak no Welsh, but used French more than English as his own language. It is from this precedent that English monarchs have, ever since, named their first-born son and heir Prince of Wales (it is not itself strictly a hereditary title in the sense of being passed from the Prince to his first-born, but reverts to the crown in the event of the Prince's death; nor has there ever been a Princess of Wales).

The British Parliamentary system has broken down in Ulster as it has broken down many times in Ireland in the past. In fact, many events in the current agonizing crisis of Northern Ireland suggest scenes from the past. The mutual hatreds of Catholics and Protestants seem unchanged from the seventeenth century world of Cromwell and William of Orange. The Orange Lodges of 1973 seem the same as those of 1795. William Craig's Ulster Vanguard is a conscious revival of Sir Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers of 1912-1914. The Provisional I.R.A. in 1973 attempts to re-enact the history of the Irish Republican Army of Michael Collins in 1920 and 1921. One element from past Irish troubles, however, is fortunately lacking. This breakdown in Ireland, unlike all earlier breakdowns, has created no crisis in Britain. In the past, British Governments have been badly shaken by Irish troubles. This time, however, there is no battle over Ireland either within the British parties or between the British parties.

It was dramatically different in the months between April, 1912, and August, 1914, the period of the battle over the Third Home Rule Bill and the starting point for this paper. This Ulster crisis brought Ireland to the brink of civil war, turned the Conservative Party into sponsors of rebellion, and produced something like a mutiny among the officers of a British Army unit. These events have been described in several books and in many chapters of political histories and biographies. Indeed, the Ulster crisis and the reactions of the Conservatives, Liberals, and Irish Nationalists have been amply studied. Only one group in the story has been neglected. With the exception of George Dangerfield in his Strange Death of Liberal England, writers on the Ulster crisis virtually ignore the Labour Party. This is easily understood. The battle over Home Rule which initiated the Ulster crisis of 1912-1914 was waged between the Liberal Government allied with the Irish Nationalists on one side and the Conservative Party with their Ulster Unionist wing on the other.

In recent years there has been considerable interest in Victorian politics and the Victorian political system. This has provided a substantial and continuing literature, much of which, however, remains preoccupied with leadership and organization at a parliamentary level. It may, therefore, be valuable to suggest an area within this most traditional of fields which might provide an alternative approach to that of “high politics”—of cabinet intrigue and parliamentary speech-making. In fact, one might ignore, for the moment, Parliament altogether, and consider that side of Victorian political activity which has been largely obscured by Hatfield dinner parties and Highbury foxing. That is, the manner in which Englishmen from outside Westminster, and perhaps from outside the formal institutions of party and government, attempted to determine the substance of issues and solutions debated in Parliament and at Whitehall.

One should avoid confusing the visible and symbolic place Parliament has occupied with the reality of political initiative. In England the rapid growth of new economies and the cities they created in the North and Midlands at the beginning of the Victorian age detracted from the centralness of London and Westminster, blurring somewhat the focus of English economic and political life, and creating new urban hierarchies consciously opposed to domination from Whitehall. Within the vast new urban centers, fed by a rural migration and accellerated by the spreading railway system, voluntary associations of all sorts became a peculiarly Victorian characteristic—serving perhaps as surrogates for a sense of community lost in the passage from a rural to an urban environment. Reading and corresponding societies, social clubs, self-help and benevolent associations, charities—this kind of activity penetrated Victorian society from the respectable working classes to the very rich. Related to this social phenomenon was a growth in local and national political associations—what one might today call “cause lobbies.” It is this type of pressure group activity, predominantly urban and probably largely middle-class, which needs to be more systematically studied. This essay will attempt to indicate the value of such research into “low politics,” and to suggest some avenues of approach.

Although Henry Fielding may not always have been fully aware of his participation in it, he and the colorful Mrs. Eliza Haywood conducted a feud which began in 1730 and did not end until 1752. There was a time of apparent peace between them when Mrs. Haywood worked for Fielding at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1736 and 1737, a fact which may account for Fielding scholars being aware only of the final engagements in 1751 and 1752 when Mrs. Haywood launched an attack upon Fielding in the course of her heroine's adventures in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, and Fielding apparently retaliated by bringing a B— T— to trial in his Covent Garden Journal, charging her with dullness. There had, however, been earlier action which makes clear that Mrs. Haywood felt herself to be a woman scorned; and, that although she had been attacked in print by other writers of her day, it was the scorn of Fielding she could least bear.

Up to now it has been Mrs. Haywood's attack upon Fielding in Betsy Thoughtless that has been the puzzler. G.F. Whicher, her biographer, could give no satisfactory explanation, calling it “An outburst of unexplained virulence.” Fielding scholars add little more. They do not, indeed, go much beyond Austin Dobson's:

Revolts against English monarchs, varying in scope and intensity, marked every reign from 1100 to 1272. After that, if we consider what happened to Edward II and Richard II, and the Wars of the Roses and the troubles of the first Tudor, we see pattern emerging in the shape of constitutional change induced through revolt. Even in the context of that centuries-long pattern, there was something special in the revolt of 1173-4, when three sons of Henry II united with an array of anti Plantagenet barons and continental neighbors to try to unseat the powerful king of England, who also held Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and the feudal conglomeration that comprised Aquitaine.

For reasons that I shall attempt to develop, the complex events of those two years constituted a watershed for mediaeval England, separating an age of feudal institutions from an age of royal bureaucracy that bore hints and suggestions of the modern era. The generational gap between sons and father added drama to the conflict, and psychological forces were inextricably bound to political forces as the revolt developed.

The principal historians of the Cromwellian period, from S. R. Gardiner to Christopher Hill, have asserted that Oliver Cromwell was a master of statesmanship whose foreign policy was guided by clear, though perhaps archaic, objectives; that his diplomacy was always aggressive, and largely successful; and that with him England entered into her rightful place in the community of nations. These axioms have been repeated in every textbook. The phenomenon is not unknown in recent history where, until A.J.P. Taylor suggested differently, few English writers dared to question the culpability of Adolf Hitler in bringing on the 1939-1945 war. Though Mr. Taylor's views excited critical comment, they have not been without supporters, and are being addressed by historians of the Twentieth century. This essay re-examines the diplomacy of the Cromwellian period, specifically in the years 1654 through 1657. It suggests that a revision of long-established views is in order.

Milestones of English foreign affairs during the Protectorate exhibit an apparent uniformity of policy. From the Treaty of Westminster of April 1654 to the Battle of the Dunes, June 14, 1658, the trend was towards a firm association with France, with the ultimate objective to destroy Spanish power in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Such a generalization must be treated with caution, however, for it can be demonstrated that the course of English policy between the conclusion of the First Dutch War and the death of Oliver Cromwell was guided less by a desire for an alliance with France than by a series of miscalculations, the cumulative effect of which left the Protector little choice but to join with France, and thereby to assist in the establishment of the hegemony of Louis XIV.

“I love a mob,” the aging Duke of Newcastle said in 1768, “I headed a mob once myself. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.” As I read those words I wondered if the good Duke, who was 73 when he said them, had slipped into senility or into an aged-ripened concept of the past, for the textbooks tell of the Jacobite rioting at George I's accession and during and after the Rebellion of 1715, but not of mob action in support of the Hanovers. The more specific histories of the period such as George Rude's Hanoverian London show that some of the events which we interpret as riots were actually pitched battles between mobs of Jacobite sympathizers and friends of the new government. This shows the existence of rival forces but where was Newcastle's mob? This paper attempts to define that mob, to explain the reasons for its formation, to show its organization around the young Pelham-Hollis, Duke of Newcastle, and to illustrate its activities.

The perspective of time has allowed most British historians to declare the English phase of the British Revolution of 1688-1689 “glorious” whereas the Scottish developments largely have been ignored as inconsequential. Although Scotland was included in Macaulay's History of England, for the past century it has been mentioned only briefly in historical treatments of the Revolution. Yet the Scottish Convention Parliament of 1689 not only followed and fulfilled the English Parliament's revolutionary initiative, but in an independent process paved the way for a more fundamental, uncompromising, and far-reaching constitutional settlement.

Lacking foresight to know that their best efforts would be amalgamated in the Union of 1707, Scottish politicians in 1689 forged ahead with a radical revolution that terminated Stuart absolutism and provided a fleeting chance for national independence under a constitutional monarchy. The event which opened the way for a revolutionary constitutional settlement was the forfeiture of the throne by James II & VII and the subsequent conditional offering of the same to William and Mary by the Scottish Estates in the spring of 1689.

In January 1689 following the final flight of James VII from Britain and the simultaneous collapse of his Scottish administration, the leaders of the Scottish aristocracy assembled at Whitehall and temporarily placed the government of their realm in the hands of Prince William of Orange pending a Convention Parliament.

Among the numerous preoccupations of historians one of the most persistent concerns the political and diplomatic skill of England's Elizabeth I. From the two extremes of James Anthony Froude and Elizabeth Jenkins through the judicious work of J. E. Neale, scholars have long been frustrated by the English queen's apparent inconsistency, though dazzled by the brilliance of her reign. The result is a plethora of argument. It is the attempt here to illuminate Elizabethan foreign policy by isolating one minor aspect of it: the career of the Portuguese Pretender, Don Antonio. Hopefully the result will be a slightly clearer perception of that most illusive lady.

It can be asserted that two interests went to the very heart of foreign affairs in the reign of Elizabeth I: the encouragement of English maritime expansion and the resolve to keep the Netherlands from absolute domination by a major continental state. The maelstrom of international events in the second half of the sixteenth century placed both of these policies in stark juxtaposition to the interests of Spain, the greatest state of the age and the spear's tip of the militant Counter-Reformation.

By 1580 Anglo-Spanish relations had suffered a steady deterioration for two decades. The might of Philip II of Spain appeared boundless. Then in that year Philip's power grew perceptibly greater by the acquisition of the Portuguese throne, the significance of which did not escape the English. Had it not been for a persistent rival-Don Antonio, the Prior of Crato—King Philip might have conquered an old and respected kingdom with no more effort than it took to lace his boots.

On the afternoon of Thursday, the 10th of June 1540, a squad of Yeoman of the Guard burst into the Council Chamber in Westminster Hall, and arrested Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister. They escorted him out through a postern to a boat waiting at Westminster Steps, rowed him down the Thames, and through Traitors' Gate into the Tower of London. Within this gaunt prison Cromwell was held till the early morning of July 28th, when the Yeoman marched him to Tower Hill to be executed for treason, heresy, bribery, and misuse of power. He climbed the scaffold, and addressed the crowd. He had come here to die, he confessed, and not to justify himself. He was a grievous wretch, who sought God's pardon. He had offended the King, and asked the crowd to pray that Henry VIII would forgive him. Finally, Cromwell insisted that he would die a Catholic, and that he had never waivered in a single article of the Catholic faith. Then, after a short prayer commending his soul to the Almighty, Cromwell laid his head on the block, and, as John Foxe records, “patiently suffered the stroke of the axe” swung “by a ragged and butcherly miser [who] very ungodly performed the office.”

So died one of England's greatest statesmen—the architect of the Reformation and the Tudor Revolution in Government. Just as his career has been the source of much historical debate, the events of the last seven weeks of his life, from his arrest to his execution, and his scaffold address especially, have been an irritant of contradiction and confusion.