Contemporary perspectives on the activities of English medieval ships and mariners are somewhat distorted, since historians are rarely able to examine mercantile or marine activity from the personal records of merchants, mariners, shipbuilders, corderers, or others involved in maritime affairs. The sources are overwhelmingly royal and so they reduce the individual efforts of men and their ships to entries of income and expenditures in exchequer records, commissions of arrest or impressment, legal briefs, and occasional parliamentary records. The chroniclers prove of little help because of their general unfamiliarity with maritime affairs or because of the restricted interests of their patrons. Consequently, historians are forced to revert to the well-preserved English archival material which can shed light on the topic. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of the administrative records of medieval England in the study of ships and mariners. The focus of the essay is on the early history of the royal navy as opposed to the merchant ships impressed by the crown. Although this approach is not unique, questions regarding the composition, maintenance, or manning of royal fleets are traditionally answered by a discussion of the merchant marine. This study has been confined to the fourteenth century — a period crucial to the English experience because of the origins of the Hundred Years' War with France and the demands which the war placed upon the naval resources of England.

English fleets in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relied heavily upon the Cinque Ports whose commitment of 57 ships for 15 days' service per year was formalized in the thirteenth century by “ancient custom.”

In his discussion of Joseph Conrad's fiction in The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson writes:

This linkage of the sea with capitalism allows Jameson to deal with Conrad's novels (especially Lord Jim and Nostromo) as, to use Jameson's own phrase, socially symbolic acts—the sea is “the privileged place of the strategy of containment” and it provides Conrad a laboratory where “human relations can be presented in all their ideal formal purity.” Jameson has identified nautical fiction's important place in any story of the novel—the confining (yet paradoxically freeing) nature of the sea (and the ship) screens out the extraneous material of the world, forcing confrontation, laying bare power relations and allowing the writer to focus on the human condition. The sea allows for only the essentials: clearly defined hierarchies, and life and death on easy terms. Jameson links Conrad with high modernism and thus with capitalism, but his positioning of the sea in relation to power and history can be, I believe, “read back” and then applied (in a necessarily nascent form) to the literary sea of the eighteenth century.

There is nothing particularly subtle about a coat of arms with a crest depicting “a demi-Moor proper bound in a cord.” Nearly anyone can deduce from it that the bearer of these arms was probably a figure in the black-slave trade. Deductions along those lines would be right on the mark in the case of this particular heraldic device, for it was granted in 1565 by Queen Elizabeth I to John Hawkins on the recommendation of Sir William Cecil and the Earl of Leicester. The arms commemorate the origin of the English slave trade during the first decade of Elizabeth's reign. Under closer scrutiny, they reveal a wealth of further information about late Tudor history, telling us something about the nature and direction of economic enterprise in the 1560s, the interests of some of the key personalities of the period, and the ways in which diverse elements of society and the state combined their resources for mercantile purposes. Altogether, the crest of John Hawkins constitutes a remarkable lens through which can be seen in microcosm the variety, aggressiveness, and daring which have come to characterize Elizabethan England.

During the past quarter century, a number of distinguished scholars have analyzed Elizabethan overseas enterprise, of which the Hawkins slaving voyages were an important part. Lawrence Stone was the first to ask fundamental questions about the late Tudor economy in a provocative essay published in 1949. The same year saw the appearance of James Williamson's revised biography of John Hawkins, replete with substantial new material drawn from Spanish sources.

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.

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.

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.

A confident and victorious David Lloyd George entered Central Hall, Westminster, on the morning of November 16, 1918. Five days earlier the Germans had agreed to an Armistice, and the “Welsh Wizard” was acclaimed by his countrymen as the architect of victory. His political coalition, formed in the dark days of December 1916, had successfully prosecuted the war; now he called together political elements of that coalition to continue in peace. There were Conservatives, Liberals, a few Labour men, and others who agreed that a peacetime coalition was best for Britain and that Lloyd George should continue as its leader. These men gathered to hear the Prime Minister announce an election for the second week of December. It was his intention, he told them, to present a unified front to the nation. He wanted the best men of each party on his side.

But the Prime Minister erred, for he found a party of veterans in the election.

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.

When Miss Himmelfarb published “The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867” in this journal in November 1966, she drew one courteous protest, the substance of which, on W. E. Gladstone as “Utilitarian,” she has silently admitted in the essay as republished in Victorian Minds.

Nevertheless, some important misinterpretations survive in the new text. It appears with several notable essays on Victorian thinkers, and the collection is likely to be widely read; given the confidence of Miss Himmelfarb's style and footnote polemic, both alluring to undergraduates, it seems worthwhile to correct four main props in her argument. Miss Himmelfarb is concerned to establish that Benjamin Disraeli (the Earl of Derby is virtually ignored with four minor references) throughout 1866 and 1867 believed in a “national” inclusive electorate and that this faith permitted him an ease of manoeuvre and a hardheaded realism in the power struggle denied to the “Utilitarian” Whigs, Liberals, and Radicals. This ideological difference, she insists, is the key to the Liberals' failure and the Conservatives' triumph in 1866-67. The argument may well be true, but at two central points the evidence she adduces does not establish it.

Her view involves Miss Himmelfarb in attempting to show that both parties were committed to reform in 1866 and had been so committed at least since 1858. One would never know from her account that between 1851 and 1864 these Disraelian Conservatives attacked and repulsed three unofficial motions for extension of the franchise and three Whig Government reform bills, apart from seven motions for the ballot.

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.”

William Austin (1802–1857), the child of Deptford laborers, was adopted de facto as an infant by Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales. She rendered the child's identity such a mystery that it prompted the Delicate Investigation in 1806, a quasi-judicial affair published in 1813 in the vexed volume known as The Book. “Prince Austin” was regularly on stage during Caroline's carnivalesque rambles on the Continent from 1814 to 1820, frequently attacked in the loyalist press as “that bastard Billy Austin.” In the uproar of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820, Austin remained a target of loyalist scorn. Because Queen Caroline named him her residuary legatee at her death in 1821, his name registered aftershocks of queenite disruption through the middle of the century. In these narrative contests about Austin's identity, the metonymic traffic between a provisional family form and an absolutist national model bobbed and weaved in a disorderly fashion on the conspicuous stage of a dysfunctional royal family. On this prominent platform, adoptive contingency intermittently confounded closed absolutism.

The English Royal Navy's relationship with Scotland during the years preceding the Union of 1707 is usually cast as problematic in scholarly discussion, with the navy viewed as the enforcer of an embargo on Scottish trade with France. This study examines the Scottish use of Royal Naval convoy in the first years of the War of Spanish Succession through to 1707, focusing on the North Sea region. It adds nuance to security issues surrounding the parliamentary union by arguing that convoys to Scotland were more frequent than generally acknowledged, an improvement on the situation in the 1690s, and that when combined with the small Scottish navy, provided coverage that largely met Scottish needs. As a result, in a period of otherwise fierce debate, naval protection for Scotland was relatively uncontroversial. Convoy was therefore an unusual, if belated, success for regal union, and that success meant that Scots were more deeply enmeshed in the English system of maritime security than has been often been credited.

This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonomous individuals. Gender intersected in British courts with locality, resources, jurisdiction, social status, and familial, religious, and political affiliations to inform different women's access to justice, which involved negotiations between unequal actors within various constraints and in complex alignment with multiple and often competing interests.

This study aims both to build upon and to challenge recent historiographical interest in the cultural origins and religious associations of royalism in the midseventeenth century by examining the devotional character of the exiled royalist community of the 1650s. Focusing primarily upon those royalists closely affiliated with the court of Charles II, it assesses the impact of disillusionment, dislocation, penury, and forced mobility upon the subsequent framings and reframings of religious identities. It considers the multiple venues in which these articulations appeared and were negotiated—through personal correspondence, print, diplomacy, rumor, and conversion—in order to illuminate the challenges posed to the maintenance of clear confessional boundaries and community ideals. In doing so, this article argues for the incorporation of a much broader sense of the impact of the “English Revolution” that considers the full geographical, chronological, and cultural scope of these upheavals across Britain, Ireland, and Continental Europe.