In the Elizabethan re-organization of the English militia the muster-master was given the responsibility of supervising the training and inspecting the equipment of the trained bands in each county. As an ex-professional captain, he supposedly provided the experience in military matters lacking among those who served in the county lieutenancy and commanded the militia.

In The Muster-Master, a pamphlet written probably by Gervase Markham around 1630, unstinting tribute is paid the Elizabethan muster-masters. Confronted with an unprecedented threat from abroad as well as occasional domestic rebellion, “the state elected so many old and experienced captains and approved officers in the wars, as might furnish every county in the kingdom with one able and sufficient commander” who would instruct the bands, inspect their armor and equipment and certify all defects to the commissioners of muster. These tasks were “faithfully and skillfully performed, not by inferiors, or petty officers, which knew no more but the bare A.B.C. of war: but by such as had run through every grammar rule thereof; such as had borne the office of captain by desert and not from private letters, gaudy clothes, or lustful employments; such as have their wounds in their faces, chasing the enemy, not such as have whole skins by running away, which they now call a violent retiring.”

Not for long, however, did this situation last. By the time of the Armada the Council unwisely shifted the burden of paying the muster-masters on to the counties while the office itself became part of the lord-lieutenant's patronage. Commenting on the rising opposition to paying the muster-master's fee in the early Jacobean period, Boynton writes that the “main complaint was apparently that, subject to the Council's formal approval, the office was venal. Not that there was anything unusual in that; but the lord-lieutenants often retained this piece of patronage for their own clients, so that the county paid but had no say in the matter.” The author of The Muster-Master was deeply troubled by the results attendant on the lord-lieutenant's monopoly of military patronage in the county.

A glance at recent publications on the history of theoretical sociology in Europe would reveal that no one has yet attempted to write a full scale history of the early phases of that movement in Britain. There is certainly nothing that compares with Raymond Aron's Main Currents in Sociological Thought for British sociology. Aron's study, in fact, contains only scattered references to British thinkers and attaches little significance to them. Nor does this absence of Britishers result from some slight on Aron's part. While British sociology during the formative years of the discipline, roughly 1850-1930, did make some notable advances in its empirical branches, it produced no individual worthy to stand with theorists like Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto or Emil Durkheim.

The reasons for this shortcoming on the British part are numerous and diverse. First, British thinking generally was concerned with more practical problems and not with theoretical matters and thus, automatically favored less abstract forms of social science. Additionally, those few British thinkers interested in problems of theory generally failed to recognize the significance of the advances of Continental mental philosophers and psychologists whose work has done so much to enrich twentieth century social theory. Yet there is a deeper and more subtle set of reasons interconnected with those aforementioned for the relative stasis of British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Conrad Russell has recently asked, not for the first time, how far the divided allegiances of members of the Long Parliament were anticipated in the parliaments of the 1620s. Many who sat as M.P.s in the third decade of the seventeenth century had died by the early 1640s, while not all those who still survived were either sufficiently vocal before 1629 or politically active after 1641 to be classifiable for the purposes of this exercise. Nevertheless, Professor Russell manages to assemble a small bloc of members whose earlier politico-religious sympathies and civil war alignments are both more or less known. This group of twenty-six men splits neatly 50:50 between Royalists and Parliamentarians. According to Russell, all that distinguished one from the other in the 1620s, and the sole effective predictor of their later allegiances, was religion. More specifically, the crucial variable turns out to be commitment to further godly reformation, strong in the case of future Parliamentarians, weak in the case of future Royalists. But for Russell's explicit rejection of any “supposed correlation between ‘Puritanism and Revolution,’” the casual reader might conclude that something resembling the Puritan Revolution was sneaking back into historio-graphical favor.

For thirty years J. E. Neale’s portrait of the Elizabethan parliaments was the stuff of textbooks. Highly political and bedeviled by puritanical protobolsheviks, the Virgin Queen’s parliaments were painted as the nursery in which the modern parliamentary system, characterized by an organized Opposition, was born. In the last decade, however, Neale’s interpretations have been challenged and overturned, making obsolete most of the histories of Elizabethan England available to students. The purpose of this article is to assess the new research on Elizabethan Parliaments, to summarize what we now know about the role Parliament played in governing England, and to suggest what remains to be done.

In order to make sense of the newly emerging history of Elizabeth’s parliaments it is important to recap the working assumptions that dominated the first great era of Elizabethan parliamentary history, the Neale/Notestein age. Much of the recent work on Parliament has been in reaction to these mens’ work.

On 29 August 1070, the Norman monk, Lanfranc, was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury despite having recoiled at the prospect when informed of his appointment earlier that year. His alleged reluctance to undertake the business of the English Church is well known and accepted by Anglo-Norman historians. And the account that his compliance was forced only through the united persuasion of the king, the queen, his former abbot, Herluin of Bee, and the papal legate, Erminfrid of Sion, adds an element of unparalleled sincerity to his resolve. More than two years after his consecration, Lanfranc wrote a letter to Pope Alexander II reasserting his initial aversion to taking office: the foreign tongue and barbarous English inhabitants presented a greater challenge than he, personally unworthy and waning in vigor, wished to endure. Lanfranc then asked the pope to relieve him of his burdensome episcopal duties so he might return to the monastic life.

Modern historians have equated this petition with his initial unwillingness to take office and have tacitly appended it to those humble actions usually associated with a monk bishop. Frank Barlow writes that Lanfranc had “suffered bitterly when he first went to England.” He infers from the resignation letter that all of the archbishop's passions “were diverted into conventional monastic virtues.” And Margaret Gibson advises that “No assessment of Lanfranc … can or should stray far from Lanfranc the monk.” Lanfranc had hesitated and been reluctant to accept Canterbury; therefore, the implication is that in 1072 he humbly wished to shed the office he had been compelled to enter.

Selecting a name for the gold rush colony of British Columbia, although apparently trivial, embarrassed the government, threatened to become the focus for a groundswell of opposition to the whole idea of establishing a new colony, and offers a curious sidelight on the role of the Crown.

On 24 June 1858 Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the Colonial Secretary in Lord Derby's second ministry, wrote to the Queen to inform her that “in consequence of the recent discovery of Gold in the Neighbourhood of Fraser's River, on the Western Coast of British North America, rendering expedient the immediate establishment of Civil Government,” the government had decided “to erect at once a New Colony there.” Parliament had to authorize this, “& it is desirable that the name of the new Colony shall be inserted in the Bill.” Since the measure was to be introduced within a week, the procedure was slapdash. In asking the Queen to select a name, Lytton informed her that explorers had used the name “New Caledonia,” but did point out that the name had been used elsewhere, most notably for “the chief island of the New Hebrides Group in the South Seas where the French have lately signified their intention to form an establishment.” He added that the names New Cornwall and New Hanover had also been applied to parts of the coast by some mapmakers. While the monarch retained a significant role in mid-nineteenth century government, this hardly extended to, acting as a cartographical research institute for the Colonial Office. On 27 June the Queen informed her minister that she had settled on New Caledonia as the most generally accepted name.

In the last week of September 1756, Sir James Lowther of Lowther, the famous eighteenth-century boroughmonger, spent more than 58,000 pounds securing 134 burgages in the parliamentary borough of Cockermouth. When added to the twenty-four he already possessed this gave him more than half the total. As a result, he was recognized thereafter as being able to return both members for the borough. The Earl of Egremont, whose family had held the strongest interest since the borough was restored in 1641 to the ancient privilege of returning two members to parliament, was completely eclipsed. His younger brother, Percy Wyndham O'Brien, who had been returned with his support in 1754, retreated to Minehead at the 1761 election. Cockermouth was not contested again before the 1832 Reform Act, and its two members were counted among Lowther's famous ninepins.

Pocket boroughs were one result of the oligarchic structure that came to characterize English political life by the middle of the eighteenth century. The vigorous party struggles of Queen Anne's reign had melted away following the eclipse of the Tories and the passing in 1716 of the Septennial Act. In its place came the long Whig ascendancy, a period of political torpor that rendered burgage boroughs, in the words of Sir Lewis Namier, “predestined to become pocket boroughs.” Longer parliaments pushed up the cost of election contests, which in consequence became less frequent. If one did take place and the result was close, the inflated cost of canvassing was likely to be compounded by the near certainty of a petition.

There is a West Indian proverb, “If you kill me, bury me, too.” The concept of a West Indian federation has been killed, but it refuses to be buried and may, phoenix-like, rise out of the ashes at some future date. Perhaps this is the case because it is so much more difficult to bury ideals than it is to kill off their immediate results. As a factual reality, the Federation of the West Indies expired almost at the very moment of its birth. The funeral rites were without ceremony. Friends of the deceased grieved, while others grinned, and all shared in the paltry inheritance. Yet, as an ideal, it is enshrined in the hearts of many West Indians who continue to look beyond their very narrow geographical limits for a bond that will unite them with others for the greater glory of the entire West Indian community.

If the Federation of the West Indies becomes a reality — and the initial failure may be a necessary step in its ultimate success — it will be but another demonstration that the spirit of nationalism cannot be checked by the facts of geography and economics. In politics, vision and the sense of mission often enable men to climb mountains even if they are unable to move them. Man's indomitable spirit, which enables him to deny God and nature, is exemplified in the nationalistic movements so characteristic of the last hundred years and more, which are reaching new heights of intensity, if not frenzy, in our own day.

During the unusually hot summer of 1857 English society was shocked and outraged by reports of atrocity and mass murder. News of the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny reached London on June 26, 1857 and, during the succeeding months, tales of massacre and torture followed. Polite Victorian society was incensed. This article examines Parliament's response to this crisis. It reveals that there exists no simple relation between events occurring outside Westminster and the response within. Parliamentary perception passes through the medium of public rhetoric, established policy, party circumstance, and the private concerns of prominent personalities. This creates less a refractive distortion of events than a new aspect to their understanding. Issues such as India acquired significance within a continuing context of parliamentary circumstance long preceding the immediate cause of substantive concern. This article, then, is not about India as such, but about the particular form the Indian question assumed within Westminster. This is a significant concern in itself because of the insight preoccupation with India provided into the tensions, antagonisms, aspirations, and hopes shaping party alignment during the mid-nineteenth century.

A further aspect of this translation of external circumstance into parliamentary perception is that an issue only became the occasion of crisis when it was portrayed as critical. Once again, there existed no simple relation between external events and the response within Westminster. Popular moral outrage over native atrocities became a political crisis over administrative reform. This particular parliamentary response was neither necessary nor inevitable. The recognition of crisis and the particular crisis perceived are themselves historical events that require explanation.

Once upon a time men who read and wrote about Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, were convinced that he was a modern man, by which in some measure they seem to have meant their kind of man. This conviction became fully standardized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those, however, who saw him as a modern man — Lord Acton, Bishop Creighton, Principal Lindsay, Sir Sidney Lee — could not help but view More with impatience. For in their eyes he reneged on his modernity. He did not in the end stand firm for free thought, or for toleration, or for emancipation from the bondage of medieval bigotry and superstition. And although Karl Kautsky was sure that at the horizon Sir Thomas had seen the red light of the Marxist dawn, More did not even throw himself into the struggle for socialism. Instead he approved of the execution of men who were burnt at the stake because they rejected the spiritual control of the medieval church; and in the end he died a martyr for the unity which through the centuries that orthodox and persecuting Church had imposed on Europe.

To those who recall Christopher Hill's brilliant cameo of Oliver Cromwell, published on the tercentenary of his death, the title of this short article may seem surprising; for Hill then uncovered a series of Cromwellian contradictions: a confusion of intentions that were both revolutionary and conservative; long hesitations coupled with swift, decisive actions; apparent hypocrisy yet patent sincerity; a man who could extend the right hand of fellowship to the lower classes but not the franchise. Cromwell is perennially elusive, a riddle about whom few authorities would dare to whisper what A. L. Rowse has admitted of Sir Walter Raleigh: “I feel … that I have got him.” Like Browning's heaven, a full understanding of the man may stand forever just beyond reach; even so the search for novel patterns and fresh approaches is bound to continue.

Despite the title, this note does not intend to subvert Hill's conclusions. Instead it begins where he ended, and seeks to carry his method of paradoxology further — to prospect for sources of ambivalence in Cromwell's theology rather than in his politics or in his social background to see whether the results might not unravel some of the apparent ambiguities of his practice.

It could be objected that the better way to understand Cromwell is “existentially rather than essentially”: one should look to his career rather than his creed and analyse his specific decisions in the context of the crises that usually accompanied them. But this approach has been tried and tried again, and still the results are inconclusive.

This article examines the place of the literary lower-middle-class clerk in the English landscape between ca. 1900 and 1940. It draws attention to “clerical literature”—as typified in works by Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Shan Bullock—and, more specifically, a subgenre that signposts the emergent interest in getting “back to the land.” At the heart of this subgenre of “rambling fiction,” the male clerical protagonist not only engages with the natural landscape on a journey through rural England but also explores notions of masculinity, heritage, and national identity. By focusing on middlebrow works, largely those written by former clerks themselves, this article argues that clerks were pioneers in drawing connections between a re-masculating exposure to the great outdoors—necessary for suburban, domesticated, office workers—and an appreciation of a particular palimpsest of England's history. In doing so, the clerk helped to popularize the continued association of medievalism, the South of England, and the rural “idyll.”

The crown's tenuous control over remote regions of the realm created a persistent problem in sixteenth-century England. Feudal ties and social unrest presented greatest danger in the North, but the early Tudor monarchs worried about the West as well. For one thing, the western counties were especially vulnerable to possible foreign invasion. Secondly, the internal power structure in the West included a loyal but independent gentry and a commons far from passive. In such circumstances, royal control in the West might have disappeared entirely without solid aristocratic support. King Henry VIII depended upon his cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, to provide such support during the first three decades of his reign. Until Courtenay's execution for treason in 1538, his lands and offices ensured his position as the leading aristocrat, the role which John, Lord Russell assumed in 1539.