When the Scots advanced on England in August 1640, reports of their formidable progress quickly reached London. Their march was

It would be hard to find a more vivid example of the integration of war and religion, of assent by military laymen to clerical authority, or of manipulation of ritual to impart a message: the presence of ministers and the Bible even more than the sobriety of the troops asserted that this army was the agent of God, to the comfort of its soldiers and the terror of its enemies.

Could England achieve comparable godliness, order, and confidence in execution of divine purpose in the conduct of its own war? Parliamentary clergy lived in hope of similar recognition and achievement. Yet at best ritual must be distinguished from accompanying practice, as the conduct of Scottish soldiers in Newcastle and its environs was to demonstrate; at worst the clerical message was derided and ignored.

Lord Palmerston's constituency of support within the nineteenth-century Liberal party has received relatively little attention from historians. In many ways, however, his strong plebeian following provided the major popular current within Liberalism prior to the emergence of the cult of Gladstone in the mid-1860s. Even after Palmerston's death in 1865, his legacy continued to exercise a powerful influence, and William Ewart Gladstone, Viscount Hartington, Lord Rosebery, and others vied with one another for possession of his mantle and the role as his successor.

Historians have shown themselves baffled by this phenomenon of Palmerston's popular appeal. Conservative historians have sought to annex Palmerston for the Tory interest. Themes like “the nation,” the sanctity of British citizenship, and defense of British interests abroad they see as presaging the appeal of Benjamin Disraeli's “imperialism.” Most have combined in portraying Palmerston as a profoundly “illiberal” figure, more Tory than the Tories, whose views sat uneasily alongside such canons of Liberalism as free-trade noninterventionism and Gladstone's graduated program of parliamentary and civil-service reforms. His contribution to the midcentury Liberal consensus was, however, a major one, and must be seen as carrying equal weight with that of such figures as Richard Cobden, John Bright, and J. S. Mill.

Recent reappraisals of Liberalism have challenged the notion of a uniform, popular Liberalism in the 1850s and 1860s. In their research Patrick Joyce and James Vernon have emphasized the degree to which Liberalism at a popular level was a fusion of older and newer political forms, incorporating long-standing radical memories of the mass platform, traditional styles of leadership, and established methods of political communication.

New Aliens. By not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so. In bad times the barbarians were at our gates; on more fortunate occasions we were at theirs. As we changed, so did our alter ego. A hundred-plus years ago in England, “we” were the upper classes, perhaps the middling lot aspiring upward. Primarily men. The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home. And if we were not men, we mostly pretended we wished we were. We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us, an acquaintancy which led to multiculturalism, gender assertiveness, and subjectivism. In the process we found new aliens—the DWEM (dead white European males).

Some of us have maintained our moral righteousness throughout, whereas others have been skeptical all along. Having gone through a generation of a strong antipatriarchal/anticolonial writing, writers of different persuasions have come to reevaluate and pose challenges to the new edifice. Suspended between conflicting incredulous postmodernist sensibilities and a pragmatic sense that communication is maintained despite its announced demise, it seems an opportune moment to examine the new attitudes to writing (imperial) history in light of such questions as the role of agency within and against a dominant discourse, the place of morality in the writing of history, and the process of alienation mediated among competing victimizations.