This is the third in a series of studies dealing with the history of the proxy system in the House of Lords. The first, after tracing the origin of proxies to the Roman law of agency, dealt with the emergence and spread of representation by proctors in the ecclesiastical and political assemblies of medieval England. The second study demonstrated how the proxy system was perfected in the upper house during the reign of Henry VIII and how the Crown benefited from that system. The ensuing article concerns proctorial representation during the crucial years of the Edwardian Reformation. Because of the brief period under consideration — only six years — it seemed best to cast the study in an analytical rather than a chronological framework. The first section deals with the general characteristics of proctorial representation in mid-Tudor times; the second and third sections cover the spiritual and temporal lords, respectively; and the fourth section treats the relationship between the proxy system and conciliar government.

I

Knowledge of the proxy system in the mid-sixteenth-century House of Lords remains somewhat fragmentary and limited in scope. A satisfactory treatment of the subject does not exist. Constitutional and legal historians have paid little attention to proxies and less to the procedure governing their use in the upper house. As one might expect, Bishop Stubbs dealt with proxies in medieval Parliaments and correctly associated them with parliamentary privileges, but at the same time he concluded that “its history has not yet been minutely traced.

Men and women who wish to uphold the interests of the textile trade should “make fashion follow the trade, and not trade the fashion,” declared Daniel Defoe in 1705. But long before this time the East India Company had discovered that the exploitation of fashion for profit is a more artful business than a mere dictatorship exercised by the “trade.” After 1660 the Company's policy regarding the import of cotton textiles was particularly concerned to influence the type and design of goods produced in India to make them serve current English needs and trends in taste. Striking success was achieved by the end of the century, but thereafter the flow of cotton manufactures was impeded by serious difficulties, chiefly the restrictions imposed on the trade by prohibition acts in 1701 and 1721, together with the competitive development of domestic calico-printing.

The English had of course been familiar with cotton for several centuries before 1660, although the acquaintance brought little opportunity to build up technological skill in the processing of pure cotton goods from the raw state to the finished piece. Imports had included raw “cotton-wool” from the Levant for use in stuffing and quilting and fustians of European manufacture containing cotton. But probably it was not until the sixteenth century that a cotton weft was used in the production of domestic fustians, and not until the seventeenth that cotton was brought into linen and smallwares manufacturing. The early history of pure cotton fabrics in England is debatable ground, partly because of confusing terminology; so-called “cottons,” for instance, were produced in England before 1660, but the term is descriptive of the finishing process, or “cottoning,” rather than of content.

Looking back on his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1771 to 1782, Lord Sandwich considered that one of his most important accomplishments was the introduction into the royal dockyards of task work for shipwrights — “a matter very little known in the world, but the only material improvement … which will enable us to build and repair a much larger number of ships.” Task work had long been universal in private shipyards, and its use in the navy's own yards was discussed at intervals for eighty years at least before its adoption in 1775. But opposition to the method — from the Navy Board and the shipwrights and their officers — was entrenched. Arguments against it, having once prevailed, afterwards were seemingly invincible, their mere invocation being enough to stop further consideration. The obstacles after so long a time might have been insuperable to one less confident and determined than Sandwich. Indeed, the innovation when it was made produced a strike of shipwrights which forced its partial abandonment before the scheme had properly been tried.

Task workers, instead of being employed for a fixed daily wage with an additional allowance for overtime, were paid according to the amount of work actually performed, the ship itself being divided into parts, for each of which an over-all labor price was established and apportioned equally among the men. The advantages of the method appear on the face of it overwhelming. The shipwrights were encouraged to work steadily and rapidly in order to increase their earnings, which thus were greater than those of the day workers.

In recent years the received picture of contemporary English attitudes to the American Civil War has been considerably modified. It has been demonstrated that there were a great many more currents of feeling, cutting across both party and class lines, than the traditional version, sowed by pro-Northern propagandists, allowed. Liberals, Conservatives, and intellectuals were all divided among themselves to some degree. If there was a good deal more pro-Federal sympathy among the English ruling class than was once thought, there was more pro-Southern sympathy among the middle and working classes, at least before 1863. At the same time, the British Government was more sincere in its stance of neutrality than was formerly suggested. The purpose of this article is to examine responses to the Civil War in Bradford, a West Riding industrial town where opinions were strongly influenced by newspapers, chapels, and Radical politicians — in other words, the kind of town where the Federal cause could expect to obtain solid support.

II

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Bradford's population had grown from thirteen thousand to over 100,000. By 1861 Bradford was the ninth largest town in the country. Now almost the whole of Britain's worsted industry was concentrated in an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire around Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield. Within this area Bradford had replaced Halifax as “the principal seat and emporium of the worsted manufacture.” The town was predominantly nonconformist in religion and Radical in politics; in fact the two were closely linked.

The character of public opinion concerning contemporary foreign problems, despite abundant data and sophisticated analyses, is sometimes elusive; it is of course more tenuous respecting issues of an earlier era when polling techniques were unknown. Studies of mid-Victorian public opinion and foreign policy by B. Kingsley Martin on the Crimean War and Miriam B. Urban on the Italian War of Unification have by necessity equated the attitudes of the press, Parliament, and public addresses with public sentiment. They often assume that, under circumstances such as Russophobia and sympathy for national liberty, certain pin pricks of events elicit spontaneous and genuine expressions of public opinion. To be sure, this assumption has some validity. But owing to the paucity of documentary evidence, propaganda has received altogether too little attention.

The writings of Polish agents for 1863 provide a basis for illuminating an instance of propaganda in the mechanics of mid-Victorian public sentiment. Yet J. H. Harley and K. S. Pasieka, while charting the course of English opinion in 1863, have almost completely ignored propaganda, while Henryk Wereszycki has treated it cursorily. This essay, consequently, aims to draw back the curtains a bit, go backstage, and observe how actors received suggestions, inducements, and sometimes even scripts to perform their roles.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a widespread effort to reassess Victorian values so that they might be retained, but in a more viable form. The new democracy was the catalyst in this introspective process which affected political thought most of all. Before the Great War the anomalous behavior of the new citizen, in the streets and at the polls, compelled thoughtful attention to political problems in England. In reaction to the unreasonable and unpredictable behavior of the new democracy, a new democratic liberalism and a new elitism came into being. New liberalism, in trying to qualify rationalist assumptions and transform the negative program of nineteenth-century liberalism, largely succeeded. New elitism, like old elitism, in concluding that the great majority were fit only to be governed, largely failed. But the elitist critique of mass urban democracy was as compelling to many people as the new liberal's defense. While liberalism has received critical comment, discussions of elitism have been limited to Fabian methodology or subordinated to analyses of Utopian programs. Yet the most formidable elitist argument came from the infant science of social psychology, developed concurrently by William McDougall, a physiologist, and Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon and neurologist. In prewar Britain, social psychology was the basis for a political critique of democracy presented as a scientific analysis of behavior.

This paper deals with the validity of social psychology as a reading of history which concluded in political elitism. The accuracy and significance of the social psychologists' explanation of behavior are assessed solely in terms of its political implications as a plea for government by an Elect of social scientists, a plea hidden within a purportedly scientific account of social evolution.

The British General Election of May 1929 was a disaster for Stanley Baldwin's Government. The Conservatives lost 155 seats in all and in consequence became the second largest party in the House of Commons for the first time since the General Election of December 1910. The formation of a Labour Government appeared to be so unavoidable that the Prime Minister did not even wait to meet Parliament but resigned office at once, advising King George V to send for Ramsay MacDonald.

In attempting to explain this Conservative failure, historians have tended to stress the persistence of the unemployment problem and the alleged folly of Baldwin in choosing “Safety First” as his campaign slogan. Even a cursory examination of the Government's record during 1927 and 1928, however, lends support to the suspicion that a succession of controversial decisions in the field of foreign affairs may also have contributed, albeit marginally, to the magnitude of the Conservative failure in 1929. Certainly more than one well-wisher thought it necessary to warn the Conservative cabinet that its conduct of foreign policy — and especially those aspects relating to international disarmament negotiations — might have significant electoral implications. For example, on October 12, 1928, the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir William Tyrrell, wrote to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Lord Cushendun: