The climax in the long story of Britain's blunders during the War of Independence is the campaign of 1777, the planning of which, in Whitehall and New York, was the worst that the British perpetrated in the seven years of hostilities. Their strategy in 1781 was even more disastrous in its outcome, but far more defensible in its design; the strategy of 1777 can scarcely be defended at all. It rested upon premises that many observers at the time recognized to be wildly fallacious, and it brought its due reward — the surrender that led directly to French intervention.

The campaign had no unifying concept. An army from Canada advanced by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson toward Albany, where it was supposed to be joined by a small detachment marching down the Mohawk; far to the south a substantial garrison was immobilized on Manhattan, while the main field army attacked Philadelphia by the most roundabout route it could have chosen. The British thus had three armies (ignoring, as they tended to do, their small garrison on Rhode Island), each isolated from the other two; and the Americans were free to concentrate against whichever one they chose. This was dispersion of force carried to the point of absurdity. Why was the absurdity not apparent to the Commander in Chief? to General Burgoyne? to the King's ministers in London? The question has been endlessly debated, and no final answer is possible. But an examination of the men who were principally responsible for the outcome suggests that two major factors were at work.

This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

The activities of medieval monarchs were severely circumscribed by the environment in which they had to operate. They were at the mercy of events in a more acute sense than many modern historians realize. Difficulties of communication in particular could play havoc with royal policy such that a mooted response to a problem that had arisen could be redundant before effected. Most difficult of all would be consistency in terms of royal policy except in the most general understanding of that term, and indeed it could be argued that those historians who do tend to see “consistency” in the policies of medieval monarchs are superimposing onto their subjects an order they desire for their own mental processes.

Much of what has been said so far is applicable to Henry II in his dealings with Irish Sea politics. Henry was overlord of a vast empire through which he constantly circulated and in which the Irish Sea region was but a small part. It was seldom his most important consideration. In his dealings with Ireland and its neighbors, it should always be remembered that this was a region that commanded his attention fitfully, either on its own or as part of a larger whole. It would appear that Henry did try to pursue some limited kind of consistency in areas of his Irish Sea diplomacy. He could also be inconsistent. He could and did find himself at the mercy of events and had to react accordingly.

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.

Enclosure riots were a prominent manifestation of social tension in England in the 1530's and 1540's. Although enclosures of land for pasturage and tillage had been undertaken since the beginning of English agriculture and did not usually cause social conflict, the rapid increase in population of the sixteenth century pressed hard on the available supply of land. The necessity of increasing the food supply speeded up the process of enclosure. The supplies of corn and meat could not be increased significantly without the year-round use of enclosed and consolidated plots of land, which was inconsistent with communal access to common and waste land and the stubble remaining after the harvest on arable lands. Other causes of friction in agrarian society included the greater fluidity in the land market resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries together with revolutionary methods of exploiting the land. The social relationships existing among great landlords, small holders and tenants could not remain unaffected.

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the early Tudor enclosure riot as a primitive or pre-political form of social protest. This will necessitate: (1) describing the forms and extent of violence employed; (2) distinguishing between those riots that accompany the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellions of 1548-49 and those riots that occur outside of the years of rebellion; and (3) modifying the assumption that the typical enclosure riot was perpetrated by an exasperated peasantry venting their rage upon the hedges and ditches of a commercially-minded, grasping gentry.

Irish political activity diminished in the early 1850s from previously more intensive levels. The tenant-right movement, established to secure economic justice for tenant farmers whose numbers dominated the ranks of Irish cultivators, continued to elicit a sympathetic response. But by the middle of the nineteeth century, it had deteriorated to a shadow of its former strength. The enthusiasm of the rural Irish for political causes had seemingly been drained by the traumatic experience of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. The potato blight, with the failure of a crop upon which many were heavily dependent, resulted in the death of over a half million persons. The flow of emigrants accelerated in the famine and immediate post-famine period. The population of Ireland was reduced from over eight million in 1841 to about six and one-half million in 1851. Landlords engaged in widespread tenant eviction during the famine episode. The established trend of the shift of agricultural land from crop to livestock production was accelerated.

Rural assistance programmes initiated in the famine and immediate post-famine years were primarily intended to benefit landlords and large farm operators with measures for soil improvement and drainage control. Recovery from the famine was slow and tortuous: the real value of agricultural output was still ten percent lower in the early 1860s than in the early 1850s. The reduction of the value of crop output by about one-third was largely compensated by the rise of value of livestock output. It proved to be a hostile environment for those tenant farmers surviving the famine. The tenant farmers — all but three percent of the total number of farm operators — were defeated and submissive. They offered slight resistance to measures introduced for the consolidation of estates and for the transfer of title from indebted to more commercially oriented owners.