In 1210, King John led to Ireland an army that consisted of the feudal levy of England, mercenary knights from Flanders, and a large force of Serjeants and crossbowmen, supported in the course of the campaign by some seven hundred ships. Money paid out for the ships totalled over £3,800, while wages for the crossbowmen and Serjeants topped £2,380. The 1210 Irish expedition was an impressive operation and showed Angevin government at its most effective. Modern historians, needless to say, have been impressed by the organisation and scale of the undertaking. What makes John’s Irish campaign not only impressive but terrifying was that, in one sense, it was all done to hunt down one man and his family.

On 1 June 1683, ten proprietors of East Jersey gathered in London for one of their periodic meetings to discuss colonial business. Of the ten, nine were Quakers, including Robert Barclay, Gawen Lawrie, and Edward Byllynge. The tenth, who served as the group’s treasurer, was the London attorney Robert West.’ Unknown to the Friends with whom he met was West’s involvement in the Rye House plotting, the first details of which Sir Leoline Jenkins, secretary of state, learned about eleven days later. On the 19th, the government began its crackdown on the conspirators, in part by issuing an order to search West’s chamber in the Temple. Three days later, West, now in custody, began providing the authorities a detailed account of the conspiracy to murder the king and James duke of York. Among those he implicated were other non-Quaker proprietors of East Jersey, including the barrister Nathaniel Wade and the attorney John Ayloffe, both of whom were involved in the assassination plot. As the authorities pursued the investigation, they learned of plans for a general uprising, at the heart of which were James duke of Monmouth and Lord William Russell.

Radical disunity and diffusion of effort were cardinal features of mid-nineteenth-century British politics, but only infrequently has Chartism been viewed in this context. Some historians of Chartism prefer to stress its economic roots, or treat it as a rational response to political events, or regard it as a collection of local mobilizations rather than an organized national movement. Others focus upon its democratic ideology and practice, its significance as a mass activity involving “outsiders” (the unskilled, women, the Irish), its symbols, dress, and other forms of display, or upon the deployment of military and police to combat Chartism at times of serious disorder (notably in 1839, 1842, and 1848). Some commentators regard Chartism as the basis for mid-Victorian working-class liberalism, commending the intelligent artisans of London who drew up the Charter, and condemning the violence of the Chartist North. For Dorothy Thompson Chartism was a political movement inspired by concern about threats to workers’ rights. Gareth Stedman Jones has argued that Chartist agitation marks a continuation of familiar pre-1832 radical aims and rhetoric, and that it must be explained with reference to the nature of the state, not class consciousness or the trade cycle.