ANY attempt to apply the same approach in the case of Cavaliers as I did with Puritans last year may seem doomed to inevitable failure. It will be considered futile to search for particular varieties of human temperament which inclined individuals towards adopting particular ideas and beliefs of a broadly conservative persuasion. Left-wing intellectuals, historians included, have sometimes been reluctant to admit that instinctive, emotional conservatism can be held to constitute a system of ideas at all, as opposed to a welter of prejudices and vested interests. Correspondingly, for many people of conservative views, acceptance of the world of order, hierarchy and inequality broadly as they find it—not necessarily as the best of all possible worlds but as the least bad of all realisable ones—is so obviously sensible as to need no intellectual defence or justification. None the less, not all the royalists of 1641–2 and after were unthinking conservatives, with the smallest of small ‘c’s, or at any rate not in the same sense. Not all professed the same religious tenets; not all adhered to the same constitutional principles; not all came to be royalists in the same way and at the same time. So some modest analysis of the Cavalier party in terms of what may be called ideological temperament is, I hope, worth undertaking. Not that the royalist cause has lacked its apologists, from the greatest of seventeenth-century historians to our own day. Few, however, have paused to consider the kind of people who became Cavaliers and their probable motivation.

In the summer of 1898 the entire Spanish fleet was destroyed in two successive engagements with the navy of the United States: the most comprehensive, catastrophic and humiliating naval defeats of modern history. Not only did these reverses shear Spain of the last shreds of transatlantic empire: they also inflicted a severe psychological blow to the Spanish nation at large. Already a stranger to most of the invigorating developments in economic, cultural and political life which had transformed western Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, Spain found that her backwardness and feebleness had now been devastatingly exposed to the gaze of the world. Spain had become a laughing-stock among the nations. What had gone wrong? The ‘Generation of ‘98’ was the name given to the group of intellectuals and public men who set themselves to ponder this question. They conceived of their task in large terms. It was not just a matter of diagnosing and treating present and local sickness—to employ the medical imagery of which they were so fond—but of taking account of the whole organism which was so visibly ailing; and this involved examining its early growth. An historical dimension was built into their deliberations from the outset. It is for this reason that 1898 is a significant date for the historian of medieval Spain.

THE period spent in opposition between 1945 and 1951 has generally been thought of as a key to the understanding of the activities of the post-war British Conservative Party. Autobiographies of the Party leaders of the time began to appear at the end of the Fifties, already looking back to a period in which the Conservatives had decisively changed their approach. So for example, Lord Woolton's Memoirs reviewed not only a term as Party Chairman which had been a highlight of his own crowded career, but also his sharing in a major act of transformation, a transformation that had led on to Conservative success since 1951: ‘the change was revolutionary’. Other key figures in the organisation reached similar conclusions as their own accounts appeared: David Maxwell-Fyfe argued that the new Party rules which he had drawn up had not only decisively widened the political base of British Conservatism, but that events since had confirmed the importance of the change. R. A. Butler's account of The Art of the Possible argued in 1971 that ‘the overwhelming electoral defeat of 1945 shook the Conservative Party out of its lethargy and impelled it to re-think its philosophy and re-form its ranks with a thoroughness unmatched for a century’. The effect was to bring both the policies of the Party and ‘their characteristic mode of expression’, as he puts it, ‘up to date’. As recently as 1978, Reginald Maudling—a key figure behind the scenes in 1945–51 as a speechwriter from Eden and Churchill and as the organising secretary of the committee which produced the Industrial Charter of 1947—reached much the same view: ‘We were at that time developing a new economic policy for the Conservative Party … It marked a substantially different approach for post-war Conservative philosophy.

‘COULD I only satisfy myself that D’Israeli believed all that he said, I should be more happy: his historical views are quite mine, but does he believe them?’ Lord John Manners, who wrote these words at the height of the Young England episode in 1843,1 has never lacked for company in his puzzlement. ‘The question’, says Lord Blake, ‘echoes emptily down the years. We can answer it no more certainly today than Lord John Manners could then.’2 Yet if the answer is elusive, so, in a sense, is the question: that is, the question which will most help us to understand the character of Disraeli’s ideas and their relation to the form and conduct of his career. The question whether Disraeli believed in the literal descriptive and moral truth of the views he propounded, if that is what Manners was asking, is not only unanswerable but also, perhaps, unimportant—unimportant, that is, if what we are concerned with is the genesis and instrumentality of Disraeli’s political postulates rather than their status as ‘principles’.

Late medieval English historians have recently become quite interested in the gentry, and particularly in magnate-gentry relationships. The ubiquity of indentures of retainer in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is evidence that the outward form of these relationships was changing; the question is, do they also indicate a change in the nature and purpose of such relationships? And if so, then why? G. L. Harriss, for example, has argued that the fifteenth-century bastard feudal affinity was

an attempt by the traditional leaders of society—crown and nobility—to contain the increasingly diversifying armigerous class within the old traditions of lordship and chivalry… (This) solution disintegrated not under any attack from the crown but as cumulative wealth and access to political authority gave the broad class of landowners independence from the nobility as mediators of patronage and power.

This theme of gentry ‘independence’ from the nobility was also taken up by Christine Carpenter, who suggested that forceful monarchical government in the shires could only be achieved once ‘the gentry who administered the shires could be separated from the nobility’—and this, she speculated, may have occurred as a result of the wars of the roses.

In Recent years historians of the early modern period have given much attention to the subject of literacy, its growth, its determinants and its consequences. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England saw the widespread dissemination of the printed book and a substantial increase in the proportion of the population able to use the written word. It is possible to exaggerate the historical importance of these developments, but there is no denying that they give the early modern period much of its distinctive flavour.

Martin I of Aragon, who was no friend to John of Gaunt, wrote respectfully on hearing news of his death. The remarks of foreign writers such as Froissart and Wyntoun echo similar reactions in French and Scottish princely circles. But English chroniclers tended to be perfunctory. Gower, for instance, despite his Lancastrian connection, was to say merely that death had resolved everything for the duke. Another contrast with such indifference is provided by the hostility which Gaunt often encountered in England in his lifetime. The most fully informed native chroniclers of the later fourteenth century amply testify to this hostility which, they imply, was sometimes national in scale, sometimes regional (especially concentrated in London and south-east England) and which animated members of elite groups (magnates, courtiers, knights of the shire in parliament, London citizens) or embraced wide sections of the commons as well. The Anonimalle Chronicler reports these reactions in a matter-of-fact way, Henry Knighton sorrowfully, Thomas Walsingham for a number of years with righteous approval, the Westminster Chronicler sometimes approvingly, sometimes not. Their reports have some features in common.

ALL the world's a stage, as we know, and the concept of a theatrum mundi is a venerable one. So too is the specific idea of politics as theatre. As an idea it may not seem very remarkable. Politics lives off metaphor, after all, and theatrical metaphor might seem especially appropriate to describe political activity. Do we not refer naturally to the political stage, to politicians assuming roles, to dramatic political scenes? This very naturalness, derived from repeated usage, presents a challenge. For one of the tasks of the historian is to show how what has come to seem natural came to seem so: to restore the novelty of artefacts and institutions we take for granted, to recover the impact of ideas and metaphors worn smooth by repetition. I want to argue below that metaphors of politics as theatre can be more than just a figure of speech: that they had specific and revealing meanings in the period of German history from the revolutions of 1848 to the advent of National Socialism.