The enactment into law in January 1916 of the first installment of mandatory military service in modern British history was an event whose importance few scholars dispute. While invariably considered a significant break in the British political and military tradition, recent scholarship has tended to treat the passage of the first Military Service Act as an episode that has little new to tell us about the political rivalry within the coalition cabinet presided over by Herbert Henry Asquith since May 1915. No student of the compulsory service debate can deny that he has been warned off, as Lord Beaverbrook wrote in the late 1920s that close study of the politics of conscription in the Asquith coalition would be “tedious to the last degree.” Most forbidding was the judgment of Lord Blake in his life of the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law: “The question of conscription would indeed be a tedious topic to pursue through all its ramifications. The endless discussions, the attitudes taken by public men at various times, the compromises, the disputes, constitute a chapter in English history to which, no doubt in years to come dull history professors will direct their duller research students.”

Many historians of the world war who have found the subject less dull than implied above have concluded that it presents a straightforward story: the implementation of conscription came about because the traditional policy of voluntarism had proven insufficient to raise an army of adequate size. The episode has been judged essentially a triumph of the Tory right wing (with the collusion of the maverick Liberal David Lloyd George) over orthodox Liberalism.

The demonstration in the House of Commons on March 2, 1629, by Sir John Eliot, John Selden, and several other members was an event with the most serious implications. Their protest against the Arminian movement in the English church and against the levying of Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament was in fact an appeal to the country over the head of the king's government. One is inclined to agree with Conrad Russell that this act was potentially revolutionary. Its immediate consequence was a stoppage of trade and a widespread refusal to pay customs duties, at a time of desperate royal financial need. On March 3, Eliot, Selden, and seven other members of the Commons were summoned to appear before the Privy Council, where they were later interrogated as to the meaning of their words and actions. When questioned, most of them appealed to parliamentary privilege, four (including Eliot) refusing absolutely to answer any question concerning matters in the House. Two of the delinquents, Coryton and Hayman, submitted themselves to the king and were released. The remaining seven were detained. The prosecution of these men by the Caroline regime was an important political episode too lengthy to be dealt with here in its entirety. But one aspect of these proceedings is worthy of examination in its own right. The hearings in King's Bench on the return of the prisoners' writs of habeas corpus have not received the attention and the analysis they deserve.

In the late 1680s, Archibald Pitcairne and David Gregory became devotees of Newton's natural philosophy. In the next decade, they formed the nexus of a scientific circle composed of their students. These men emerge as a specific group from the wider circle of Newton's followers for several reasons, having to do with kinship and community relationships as well as with shared intellectual beliefs. Gregory and, through him, Pitcairne were among the first to recognize Newton's achievement in the Principia. From their base in Edinburgh, later extending to Oxford and Leiden, they inspired several young men, including John and James Keill, John Freind, George Cheyne, George Hepburn, and William Cockburn. Gregory has long been recognized as a central figure among Newtonians, in part owing to his copious memoranda, but Pitcairne's significance both as an intellectual and as a catalyst has been neglected by historians. When one focuses on Gregory and Pitcairne and their notebooks and correspondence, as well as their published works, a well-defined group emerges around them who shared several characteristics. Politically, they were Tories. In religion, they were High Church Anglicans who valued the episcopacy and those points of ritual and doctrine that distinguished the English church from nonconformity. With the exception of John Freind, these men were Scots and shared kinship ties as well as geographic origin in the east and northeast of Scotland. Finally, all the members of this group were at least nominally physicians. Only one of them, John Keill, probably did not practice medicine, but he too took a medical degree.

I

“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.