Late in March 1604, as his biographer John Strype records, Archbishop John Whitgift's “Corps was carried to Croydon … and there honourably interred in the Parish-Church … with a decent Solemnity.” Sir George Paule concurred, noting that the “Funerall was very honourably (as befitted his place) solemnized.” The funeral's honor, decency, and solemnity were somewhat marred, however, for among those laudatory elegies and epitaphs traditionally placed upon hearses, some audacious soul had contrived to pin a far from complimentary piece of doggerel. Entitled “The Lamentation of Dickie for the Death of his Brother Jockie”—Jockie being Whitgift and Dickie his successor as archbishop, Richard Bancroft—the poem was a vicious tirade against the late archbishop and his policies. The fullest extant copy survives in a collection of political papers once owned by the Kentishman Sir Peter Manwood:

The prelats pope, the canonists hope,
The Cortyers oracle, virginities spectacle,
Reformers hinderer, trew pastors slanderer,
The papists broker, the Atheists Cloker
The ceremonyes procter, the latyn docter
The dumb doggs patron, non resid[e]ns champion
A well a daye is dead & gone,
and Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Prelats relent, Cortyers lament
Papiste bee sadd, Athiests runn madd
Grone formalists, mone pluralists
frowne ye docters, mourne yee Procters
Begge Registers, starve parators
scowle ye summoners, howle yee songsters
Your great Patron is dead & gone,
& Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.
Popishe Ambition[,] vaine superstition,
coulured conformity[,] canckared envye,
Cunninge hipocrisie[,] faigned simplicity,
masked ympiety, servile flatterye,
Goe all daunce about his hearse,
& for his dirge chant this verse
Our great patron is dead and gone,
& Jhockey hath left dumb dickey alone.
Yf store of mourners yet there lacke
lett Croyden coull[i]ers bee more blacke
And for a Cophin take a sacke
bearing the corpes upon their backe
dickye more blacke then any one
as chief mourner may marche alone
Singinge this requiem Jhocky is gone,
& dickye hopes to play Jhocky alone
holla dickye bee not so bould,
to woulve yt in Cheif Jhesis fould
as yf to hell thy Soule weare sould,
lest as Jhocky was oft foretould
If thou a persecutor stand,
God likewise strike thee wth his hand:
A-rankinge thee in the bloudy band
of ravening cleargie woolves in the land.

The career of John Wilkes was full of paradoxes. John Brewer's description of him as “a mercurial elusive rake” is apt in two senses: Wilkes eluded those who sought to crush him, and, posthumously, he continues to frustrate those who seek to understand him. He was a libertine who was lauded for political virtue; an aspiring aristocrat who rose to prominence as the self-proclaimed champion of those he dubbed the “middling and inferior class of people.” He would succeed in achieving a remarkable rapport with his plebeian followers, yet all the while preserving an ironic detachment from them. The judgment of one of his contemporaries still contains solace for the historian: “It is … not altogether unpardonable if a writer should err in the portrait of a character so equivocal.”

Understandably, one response to the problematic issues of Wilkes's personality and conduct has been to steer clear of them, treating them as irrelevant to the supposedly larger questions of those movements conducted in his name or in response to his persecution. From this kind of perspective, his presence on the political scene is construed as merely the occasion and not in any significant sense the cause of campaigns assumed to have separate, deep-seated origins. Such an approach offers some advantages that have been realized in distinguished studies of the crusades with which Wilkes was associated. But it is also limiting in that it forecloses the possibility that the nature of the movements that swirled around him was influenced by the idiosyncracies of his character and behavior.

Addressing the Women's Institute in London on November 23, 1897, Eleanor Sidgwick, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, observed that

With these remarks, Mrs. Sidgwick joined the extended debate over the rights and duties of spinster daughters that the Victorian women's movement pursued for decades. For many participants, it was the preeminent issue that women had to confront if they were significantly to improve the condition of their lives.

If Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill fought World War II determined not to be the prime minister who lost the Empire, Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and Herbert Morrison, who as Labour members of the Coalition government served with him, were equally determined to hold on to Empire once peace was won. The Empire/Commonwealth offered both political and economic benefits to Labour. Politically, the Commonwealth provided substance for Britain's pretensions to a world power role equal in stature to the new superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. For this claim to be effective, however, the Commonwealth needed to be demographically strong and firmly united under British leadership. Economically, imperial preferences and the sterling area offered a financial buffer against Britain's true plight of accumulated wartime debts and major infrastructural damage and neglect. Receiving over 40 percent of British exports and providing substantial, and in the case of Australia and New Zealand, dollar-free imports of meat, wheat, timber, and dairy produce, the Commonwealth seemed a logical body on which the United Kingdom could draw for financial support. In short, postwar policy makers believed preservation of the Empire/Commonwealth to be a necessary first step in domestic and foreign reconstruction.

Yet in 1945, a variety of circumstances combined to make the task of imperial preservation one of reconstitution rather than simple maintenance. First, it seemed that, just at the moment when Britain needed them most, some of the strongest and oldest members of the Commonwealth appeared to be moving away.