On the titlepage of his collection of sermons, The Happinesse of the Church (1618), Thomas Adams styled himself “preacher” at St. Gregory’s, London. The term could indicate puritan leanings, and in the nineteenth century Robert Southey went so far as to call Adams “the prose Shakespeare of puritan theologians… scarcely inferior to Fuller in wit or to Taylor in fancy.” Adams often used the word “puritan” pejoratively. Historians, however, have classified as puritans people who rejected the term for themselves, just as political analysts-sometimes justly-classify as “liberals” or “conservatives” politicians who cavil at these terms. The problem, as always, is one of definition, and Adams affords an excellent opportunity to test the adequacy of our definitions. Like “humanist” or “republican,” “puritan” is one of those terms that have come to have a meaning that transcends the circumstances in which they originated. I argue that Adams was not a puritan; he was instead a mainstream Calvinist episcopalian of the kind so convincingly described by Patrick Collinson in his Ford lectures. Nevertheless, an attempt to place Adams in the spectrum of religious opinion has a value beyond merely getting one individual situated. Scholars have contradicted each other in their placing of Adams, and this analysis, by getting him right, will throw light on our understanding of the varieties of Calvinism in early Stuart England.

The subject of monarchy remains more fashionable in the pages of People and the National Inquirer than among NEH peer review panelists or professional historians generally. To a surprising degree, indeed, the subject has been left to non-professionals or to non-historians. Yet, when one reflects on the fact that the best-known wedding and the most traumatic funeral of the twentieth century both involved the British monarchy in a very immediate fashion, then one can hardly contend that that institution is of no account in modern cultural history. In the course of the past decade, I have drafted, and in part published, a series of topical essays involving Queen Victoria as symbol, as personality, and as actor on the political stage, and this paper constitutes a consideration of yet another facet of her world. In the process of exploring Queen Victoria's world in both printed and unpublished sources, I have made two discoveries that may not surprise you unduly once I set them forth.

First, each major biographer of Queen Victoria—and there have been a great many—tends to react to the last major previous biographers. Thus Giles St. Aubyn in 1991 and Stanley Weintraub in 1987 drafted their works in the context of Elizabeth Longford's biography of 1964 and Cecil Woodham-Smith's life of 1972. The latter two wrote their lives in reaction to Lytton Strachey's biography of 1921 and Arthur Benson's of 1930. In the process, these more recent historians have at times unwittingly neglected a number of cogent conclusions reached by Sidney Lee way back in 1902.

On March 9, 1623, ten English merchants were beheaded on Amboyna in Indonesia by order of Harman van Speult, the Dutch governor of the island. They died accused of plotting to seize control of Fort Victoria, the island's stronghold, in order to take over the local spice trade. Considering the number of lives lost in the centuries of conflict between Dutch and British merchants in the East Indies, the incident on Amboyna seems in hindsight to have been a rather insignificant affair. Yet the occurrence played an important role in English politics under the early Stuarts, and influenced English/Dutch relations for a century.

News of the incident, which the English came to know as the Amboyna Massacre, reached England on May 29, 1624, and caused a diplomatic dilemma. James I, who was negotiating an alliance with the Netherlands against Spain, chose to deal with the situation through diplomacy rather than military reprisals, a position his son supported. It was a decision for which neither the Stuarts' contemporaries nor their modern chroniclers would forgive them. John Chamberlain, the friend and correspondent of many important court figures, wrote in July 1624 that he hoped James would “say lesse so he would do more” to make the Dutch pay for insulting English honor. By February of the next year, he was lamenting that he had “knowne the time when they [the Dutch] durst not have offered the least of those indignities we have lately swallowed and indured.” Chamberlain's belief that James's policy consisted primarily of inaction, and that it played into the hands of the Dutch, has been a popular theme in modern accounts.

Over the past fifteen years historians of Britain have debated the degree to which the nation's aristocracy was open to newcomers. First, W. D. Rubinstein suggested that the new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the established aristocracy had assumed a more “caste-like” mentality that held outsiders at bay. Then in 1984 two important works extended the challenge to earlier centuries. John Cannon demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts. More significantly, Lawrence and Jeanne Stone completed an immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of newcomers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites.

Other leading students of the British aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken exception to the claims of these iconoclasts. Sir John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that “there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite….” In greater detail F. M. L. Thompson called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made substantial land purchases.

Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals—puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics—were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the “firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish” promoted a “sense of social distance” between themselves (“the better sort”) and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's and Levine's study of social discontinuity, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, seemed a splendid occasion to revisit the intersection of religious conviction and social practice and to ponder the precision with which puritanism's supposed contributions to social stratification—and the stratification itself—have been, and can be, measured.

Measurements of a vastly different kind preoccupied Elizabethan religious theorists interested in gauging the effects of election and thus discovering whether they and their parishioners had been elected or chosen by God and redeemed. Assurances of election and of eternal reward were difficult to identify, because everything that Christians did or dreamed up was so deplorably flawed. “There remain relickes of syn” in the most righteous persons on earth, William Fulke preached in 1574; Christians desperate for assurance invariably experienced (and measured) those “relickes” as tokens of divine displeasure.

During the ninth century, Iona’s ancient role as the administrative and jurisdictional center of a united, pan-Gaelic familia Iae was brought to an end when it was superseded in Ireland by Kells and in what was to become known as Alba by Dunkeld. This process, which effectively created two distinct Columban churches, has traditionally been viewed as a direct consequence of the disruptive, sometimes destructive, presence of Scandinavian raiders in the Irish Sea and around the western isles. It has long been presumed that their depredations, which gained especial attention from annalists and chroniclers when a monastery was pillaged, “drove a wedge” between Ireland and northern Britain and so established a de facto schism in both secular and ecclesiastical Gaelic society. However, as John Bannerman has highlighted, the effect of the Scandinavian incursions on the Columban Church and its eventual dichotomy has been exaggerated, with the period of actual raiding relatively short-lived.

In recent years a number of studies have examined the function of heroic narratives in the propaganda of empire and the construction of “Britishness.” Graham Dawson has argued that such narratives “became myths of nationhood itself providing a cultural focus around which the national community could cohere.” In the light of the nineteenth-century chivalric ideal, the Victorian military hero was expected to be “the embodiment of the virtues of bravery, loyalty, courtesy, generosity, modesty, purity, and compassion, and endowed with an indelible sense of noblesse oblige towards women, children and social inferiors.” The English and upper-class image of the “British” hero served, among other things, to inculcate these supposedly English characteristics in the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Courage was taken for granted as the essential characteristic of British imperial officers in the Victorian period but, while courage is a personal quality and is not in itself a quality belonging to the public domain, heroism is, by contrast, something definitionally public. The courageous man becomes a hero only when he is declared to be one. The roots of the hero are in dramatic narrative, which spans the epic myth and the reality of war. The hero is “made” whether in a dramatic fiction or in the representation of events, though the latter produces the problem of molding reality to the requirements of the genre. Military heroes in the genre of the imperial adventure story and in the representation of “real” events are hardly distinguishable, for they are “made” to serve the same purposes. The hero is part of a story and, as Northrop Frye has argued, that story or langue has certain generic features throughout history. On the other hand, though the hero is made, the individual can, and often did, prepare and present himself for the role.

The English rural myth suggested that being close to the rhythms of nature, as opposed to being immersed in the irritations and pollution of city life, would create a settled, healthy, content, and loyal population. By the inter-war period the rural myth depicted an appealing image of self-sufficient, independent peasants living an uncomplicated lifestyle based on agricultural pursuits. In the aftermath of the First World War this picture of a golden countryside was popular and admired by social reformers, members of the government, and the general public. The coalition government incorporated this myth into its post-war social legislation and created in 1919 a land settlement scheme for newly demobilized soldiers aimed at establishing a new base of smallholding agricultural workers to populate the countryside. The myth may have been appealing, but it turned out to be economically not self-sustaining and politically it got little more than lip service. A myth cannot be attained through mere legislation. This article examines the land settlement scheme in East Sussex during the inter-war period and argues that even in an area seemingly well-suited to such a program, the scheme was neither practical nor successful in its attempt to put the myth into practice.

The rise of the Anglo-German antagonism before the First World War has become a commonplace in the historical literature. It has also been argued that the growth in the antagonism was accompanied by a rise in negativity in the British historiography’s treatment of Germany before 1914. Manfred Messerschmidt, for instance, has contended that British historical writings in the pre-1914 period tended to move in parallel with political trends—that is, that the British historians’ views of Germany assumed greater hostility as diplomatic tensions between the British and German governments escalated. According to Messerschmidt, a turning point can be detected in the 1894-1908 period when British historical works began to treat Germany in increasingly negative terms. Panikos Panayi, meanwhile, claims that negative images of Germany had become dominant in the British history books before 1914. As he writes: “In academic study, we can point to history where the focus upon the early history of England and the invasion of the Angles and Saxons died away as an area of interest, replaced by the history of modern Germany viewed as a threat.” As these views suggest, anti-Germanism was already firmly entrenched in the British historical profession before the start of the First World War in August 1914.

The “methods of barbarism” and the “rights of small nations” are perhaps the most recognizable of British slogans arising out of the wars of the early twentieth century. They are instantly associated with the Boer War and the First World War respectively, but seldom are they associated with each other. However, the Pro-Boer rhetoric of “the methods of barbarism” and the First World War propaganda of “the rights of small nations” are intimately linked through their roots in the pluralist Liberal vision of Britishness.

These slogans and the propaganda campaigns that they epitomized must be understood within the context of a multicultural Britain and opposing notions of British national identity. Defining “barbarism” as the oppression of small nations through the brutal use of force, the Pro-Boers associated the term with the Anglocentric vision of the British nation reflected in the “New Imperialism” of the Conservatives. Through their belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, the Conservative imperialists maintained that small nations like those of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Boers would either be assimilated or swept aside by the historical progress of an expanding Anglo-Saxon nation state. In contrast to this notion of Conservative “barbarism,” the Pro-Boer Liberals drew on the Gladstonian heritage of their party in defining the United Kingdom as a multinational state at the center of a multinational empire. They eschewed the use of force in the maintenance of empire and argued that the bonds of imperialism must be based upon mutual goodwill, voluntarism, and the recognition of the principle of nationality.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, propagandists drew upon these contrasting constructions of Liberal cultural pluralism and Conservative cultural uniformity. In terms similar to those employed by the Pro-Boers, British propagandists depicted the First World War as a struggle against German “barbarism” and as a fight to vindicate the “rights of small nations.” Solidly based upon the Liberal construction of the multicultural and multinational nature of Britishness, Britain's role as the champion of the principle of nationality was proclaimed with an eye not only to the international context of Europe but to the domestic context of the British state and empire as well.

Robert Southey is probably still best remembered as a versifying turncoat, the most reactionary and least anthologized Lake poet. He owes this reputation to the reformers of his own day, who took it amiss when he renounced his youthful dreams of radical egalitarianism and appeared to exchange them for the £300 a year he made by scribbling Court-ordered odes as Poet Laureate. By the late 1810s, opposition M.P.s were scolding him on the Commons floor for urging the suppression of just the sort of republican sentiments that he himself had committed to paper in the 1790s. Byron memorably sent him up as an apostate hack:

He had written praises of a regicide;

He had written praises of all kings whatever;

He had written for republics far and wide,

And then against them bitterer than ever;

He had sung against all battles, and again

In their high praise and glory; he had call'd

Reviewing “the ungentle craft,” and then

Become as base a critic as e'er crawl'd–

Fed, paid, and pamper'd by the very men

By whom his muse and morals had been maul'd:

He had written much blank verse, and blanker prose,

And more of both than anybody knows.

Despite being the target of such devastating attack, Southey nevertheless has had plenty of defenders over the last century and a half. Most of them have stressed his consistent commitment to humanitarian interventionism. Cuthbert Southey established this far more positive critical tradition by stressing the reforms that his father had repeatedly advocated in print: reduction of child labor in factories; addition of Anglican churches and clergymen, especially in poor urban districts; public works schemes in times of distress; land allotments for poor laborers; cultivation of waste lands by paupers; reduction of the Bloody Code and of corporal punishment in the military, along with some of the more punitive measures enshrined in the poor laws and game laws; establishment of savings banks, emigration schemes, Protestant sisterhoods of charity, and, most importantly, a national system of Anglican, state-aided popular education.