Traditionally the later Middle Ages in England have received a notoriously bad press from historians. In 1878 the great Stubbs threw his immense prestige behind the statement “the most enthusiastic admirer of medieval life must grant that all that was good and great was languishing even to death” and, for good measure condemned the fifteenth century as “a worn-out helpless age that calls for pity without sympathy, and yet balances weariness with something like regrets.” A decade after Stubbs wrote these sounding cadences an Oxford cleric, W. Denton, published a book crammed with pessimistic utterances so extreme that they were very nearly caricature. The country was impoverished because its soil was exhausted. The very people were morally inferior to their ancestors, the nobility as a class were as physically degenerate as they were ill-educated. Power had become concentrated in the hands of too few: a minority so powerful as to be almost the peers of the king himself. The rest of the nobility encumbered with debt, due to the cost of war and personal extravagance, had lost their former and legitimate influence.

Even those who derided these wild extravagances continued to regard the wretched century with immense distaste. As the tale went the premature Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment collapsed into near-anarchy, followed by the constitutional backsliding of the Yorkists and Henry VII: a “despotism” wholly alien to English political conditions, but mercifully of short duration.

Historians have long recognized that England was a haven for many French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in their native land in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They have also acknowledged the subsequent contributions which these immigrants made to English society. But scholars have largely ignored the financial assistance given many Huguenots which helped them adjust to a new society.

The purpose of this article is to describe the amount and the administration of the most important element of this financial assistance—the Civil List funds given the Huguenots from 1696 to 1727.

The reasons why French Protestants fled their homeland center around Louis XIV's determination that a strong France be one, religiously and politically. This policy, which came to a climax with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, undoubtedly reflected the opinion of most Frenchmen—to tolerate Calvinism was to court national disunity and encourage heresy. Without religious uniformity there was neither social harmony nor political solidarity.

Louis's objective was not expulsion: it was conversion. And he was overwhelmingly successful. By razing Huguenot churches, offering monetary rewards to converts, denying Protestants entry into the legal and other professions, and placing dragoons in their homes, the king forced the great majority to abjure. They preferred to await the dawn of a more tolerant age rather than endure further intimidation or physical harm.

One of the largest remaining lacunae in the modern analysis of Great Britain's parliamentary opposition is located in the years between the breakup of the Whig Party in 1794 and the end of Henry Addington's ministry ten years later. From the fall of North's government to their fragmentation in 1794, the whigs have been systematically scrutinized by Professors Christie, Cannon, Mitchell and O'Gorman, while Professors Roberts and Mitchell have provided similar service for the years from the Ministry of All the Talents to the Reform Bill crisis. But the state of the opposition during the years immediately following 1794 has not been extensively considered; in particular, the question of how any opposition managed to survive the traumas of the 1790's has been a subject for suggestion rather than analysis. And yet the question is an important one, if only because the coalition of 1794 is frequently interpreted as having produced a political and ideological alignment which in its main outlines was to dominate British politics until the emergence of the Labour Party. If true—although the geneology of the two-party system remains a productive controversy—this lends an added dimension to the perpetually enlightening study of opposition during the stress of a great war, and to the particular question of how the Foxite rump managed to endure the overwhelming ministerial dominance of the 1790's.

Charles Kingsley complained in 1848, “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere constable's handbook—an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded—a mere book to keep the poor in order.” Kingsley was outraged that religion should be used for the utilitarian purpose of keeping the lower classes in their place. And yet, in most societies religion has traditionally served the very practical purpose of supporting the established social order. To this end the Christian church—and in this regard it is no different than any other institutionalized religion—has preached a social ethic of obedience and submission to the government in power and to the established social order. The church does this by sanctioning a given code of behavior: those people who conform to the prescribed behavioral norm will achieve salvation, while those who fail to conform are ostracized from the religious community and, presumably, are damned. In sociological terms, the code of behavior approved by a given society is most often determined by that society's most influential groups, always with a view (not always conscious or deliberate) of maintaining the groups' dominance. From the point of view of the least influential classes, this didactic function of the church may be seen as an effort at social control, at internal colonialism—in Kinglsey's words, an effort simply to keep the “beasts of burden…, the poor in order.” In terms of biblical imagery the church's didactic function is to separate the sheep from the goats, that is, to set a standard of “respectable” behavior to be followed by the compliant sheep, with probable eternal damnation and temporal punishment for the recalcitrant goats.

The women's suffrage movement in Great Britain has suffered from the misconception that it was through the urgings, exertions, and sacrifices of women exclusively prior to 1918 that the vote was finally achieved. Such writers as the Pankhursts and Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who were also participants in the struggle, have set the tone of historical interpretation by describing their success in such titular terms as My Own Story,…The Story of How We Won the Vote, and Women's Victory…, a lead dutifully followed by others who have written since the passage of the Reform Bill. Almost without exception these accounts, which include Roger Fulford's Votes For Women, stress the more exciting prewar aspects of the story, thereby conveying the mistaken impression that the conferral of the suffrage was the natural consequence of feminist agitation. Those more enlightened authors who recognize the adverse effect which the militant suffragists had on their own cause and the absence of any kind of solicitation during the war have subscribed to the equally misleading explanation that it was women's participation in the war which won the vote. Such is the perspective gained from reading Monstrous Regiment by David Mitchell. A close examination of the politics of the reform question, an approach heretofore eschewed by nearly every writer of the period, reveals that the extension of the suffrage to women did not “just happen” as a result of the manifold conversions in political and public spheres, for whatever reason. Indeed the question of giving women the vote would never have arisen during the war had Parliament not been confronted with the urgency of granting the vote to soldiers and sailors on active duty.