On November 9, 1605, the warden and fellows of All Souls College wrote to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, in some distress, and, as they thought, on a matter of considerable importance. Then, as now, they elected fellows at the beginning of November. On this occasion, they believed it essential to explain that they had turned down a nominee of Salisbury and the king; the man had failed to turn up for examination, and the college nervously pointed out that it did have its academic standards. But it could assure Salisbury that another candidate of the king's was safely in. This letter is the first of many ironies of the Gunpowder Plot. It was not unusual for colleges to worry about the pressure applied by the crown and its leading ministers to their selection procedures. That this anxiety should have preoccupied this institution at this particular time is nevertheless a delightful example of the differing priorities of philosophers and kings.

For the letter was written four days after men had learned the stupendous news that the king, the queen, at least one of their children, the lords temporal and spiritual, the judges, the leading members of the House of Commons, any foreign ambassadors present, and no doubt many others as well—King James put the figure at thirty thousand—were to be blown up by the Catholics.

A Center for the History of British Political Thought has been established at the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be conducting a series of seminars aimed at covering what is conventionally demarcated as the early modern period: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. No comprehensive history of British political thought in this period has to our knowledge been written, and it is an open question of what it should consist and what its organizing themes should be. The purpose of this article is to present a speculative inquiry into its conceptual scope.

The scope and meaning of the word “British” is fundamental to our inquiry. The core component is surely England, and both the weight of literature and the tradition of study render it inescapable that English will be the language and the dominant culture with which most of our program will be concerned. It will be necessary nonetheless to recognize the autonomy of Scottish political culture and its literature and of the cultures formed by English hegemony, whose political thought must be studied both before and after their assertions of independence.

We must further examine what is to be meant by the term “political thought.” A considerable methodological literature has marked the rise in the last two decades of what has been called the “new history” of political thought. This inquiry has become less an adjunct to the practice of political theory and more a history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on.

The immediate answer to the question posed in the title is given with characteristic dry clarity by James Murray in that great work of English history the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray's first definition is “English Saxon, Saxon of England: orig. a collective name for the Saxons of Britain as distinct from the ‘Old Saxons’ of the continent. Hence, properly applied to the Saxons (or Wessex, Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, and perhaps Kent), as distinct from the Angles.” After explaining that, “in this Dictionary, the language of England before 1100 is called, as a whole, ‘Old English,’”Murray then goes on to say that the adjective “Anglo-Saxon” is “extended to the entire Old English people and language before the Norman Conquest.” Neither he nor the Supplement mentions explicitly the almost purely chronological use of “Anglo-Saxon” to describe the whole period of English history between 400 and 1066 that is now current, but it is easy to see how this has derived from the usage they expound.

What the original edition goes on to do, moreover, is to give an account of a wider use of the word that beautifully encapsulates the beliefs about culture and descent that lie behind it. The expression “Anglo-Saxon,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was then—that is, in the late nineteenth century—used “rhetorically for English in its wider or ethnological sense, in order to avoid the later historical restriction of ‘English’ as distinct from Scotch, or the modern political restriction of ‘English’ as opposed to American of the United States; thus applied to (1) all persons of Teutonic descent (or who reckon themselves such) in Britain, whether of English, Scotch, or Irish birth; (2) all of this descent in the world, whether subjects of Great Britain or of the United States.”

Centenary commemorations can have their ironies. If we look from 1783 to 1883 to 1983, we see a rise in the status of centenaries, and a decline in the status of Algernon Sidney. This is, I think, the first time that a centenary of the Whig martyrdoms has been publicly observed. But it is not the first time one has been noticed. Soon after the first centenary, a play in London by the Irish clergyman Thomas Stratford about Sidney's fellow martyr Lord Russell, apparently a theatrical disaster of some magnitude, remarked on the passage of “one hundred years since godlike Russell bled” and portrayed Sidney as “Brutus of England,” whose “pulse beats with rapture at the sound of freedom.” Eleven years later, in the north German town of Kiel, the eighteen-year-old Barthold Georg Niebuhr—who was to exert so strong an influence on Ranke—celebrated as a “consecrated day” the “anniversary of Algernon Sidney's death.” (He got the day wrong, but that was an error common enough during the process of sanctification that raised Sidney's virtues above the chronological detail in which they had found reflection.) Niebuhr noted gloomily that, although Sidney's name and his “brilliant talents” were widely known, “perhaps there are not fifty persons in all Germany who have taken the pains to inform themselves accurately about his life and fortunes.” I doubt if there are fifty today.

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.

This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.

In a sermon preached at Hampton Court on September 30, 1606, John King proclaimed that “our Solomon or Pacificus liveth.” James I had “turned swords into sithes and spears into mattocks, and set peace within the borders of his own kingdoms and of nations about us.” His care for the “Church and maintenance to it” was celebrated. All that remained was for his subjects to lay aside contentious matters and join “with his religious majesty in propagation of the gospel and faith of Christ.” The sermon was the last in a series of four preached—and later printed—at the king's behest before an unwilling audience of Scottish Presbyterians. The quartet outlined James's standing as a ruler by divine right and laid down the conceptual foundations of the Jacobean church. A godly prince, exercising his divinely ordained powers as head of church and state, advised by godly bishops, themselves occupying offices of apostolic origin and purity, would preside over a new golden age of Christian peace and unity. A genuinely catholic Christian doctrine would be promulgated and maintained; peace and order would prevail. James I was rex pacificus, a new Constantine, a truly godly prince. As he himself observed in 1609, “my care for the Lord's spiritual kingdom is so well known, both at home and abroad, as well as by my daily actions as by my printed books.”

Historians have begun to rediscover the Puritan Revolution. A number of recent studies concentrating on the Long Parliament, on particular counties, or on clusters of religious ideas have found religious divisions at the heart of the collapse of early Stuart government. This article tries to consolidate this trend by looking at the behavior of one prominent individual. If it was indeed religious conviction that drove active minorities to take up arms, then it is essential to find men who have left enough evidence of a sufficiently intimate kind to permit us to pry into the feelings and longings that determined their particular responses to the developing crisis in church and state. While it is hoped that such a case study can help to clarify general issues, it is obviously not possible to claim that one case study demonstrates any particular theory of allegiance. This article presents an instance of a general theory and no more.

The subject of the first part of this article is Sir William Brereton (1604–61) of Handforth in Cheshire, who will be examined as a Puritan magistrate in the 1630s, as a Parliamentarian activist in the early 1640s, as a county boss in the war years, and as an increasingly disillusioned “honest radical” from 1646 and especially from 1653. He is probably better documented in the public records than all but twenty or so M.P.s in the Long Parliament, and his fifteen hundred extant letters plus a collection of private papers and travel journals from the 1630s make him probably the best documented of all county bosses, at least down to 1646.

On July 21, 1683, William, Lord Russell, the former leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons, was executed in Lincoln's Inn Fields for high treason. The week before a jury had convicted him of conspiring with other Whig leaders in schemes that have become known as the Rye House Plot to raise rebellion by capturing King Charles II's guards and, thereby, in law, to kill the king. But Russell is not known in history as a traitor or even as a Whig conspirator. Rather he is remembered as a Whig martyr, as a victim of late-Stuart tyranny, a man who suffered death in the cause of the liberties and rights of Englishmen and the true Protestant religion. To explain how the Whig conspirator became the Whig martyr and has remained so from 1683 to the present is my central purpose in this essay. I will show that the carefully constructed image of Russell as martyr drew inspiration from familial and political considerations and that it has influenced our understanding not only of Russell but also of late-Stuart politics and political ideas.

It is self-evident, I think, that a martyr is made—and made only by the interaction of three factors. First, an individual must die or endure suffering with great courage on behalf of some cause or principle. Although this is true of all martyrs, there seem to be no personality traits common to them. A common pattern of psychological behavior does seem apparent, however, among sixteenth-century English Protestant martyrs awaiting execution. Curiously, given the quantity of twentieth-century martyrs, modern psychiatrists have not studied martyrs systematically, but one has ventured the suggestion that a physiological condition—a “highly developed cortical base” in the brain that increases a person's capacity for empathy and decreases his regard for egocentric needs—may account for an individual's self-sacrifice. This is a tantalizing thought, but, obviously, at this remove in time it is impossible to discover anything about the structure of Lord Russell's brain. But evidence does show that he was a heedless person, prone to act without calculating the consequences.

Three points by way of introduction. The first concerns the definition and delineation of the subject. Because kingship is but one ill-defined kingdom in the shifting intellectual heptarchy of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, I have been rigorous almost to the point of ruthlessness about excluding topics just at or beyond our boundaries. Not only scholarly contributions and scholars but also whole fields and subfields of historical inquiry have been precluded from consideration: the list of neglected, ignored, and relegated topics is very long indeed. Then I come to the question of whether this survey has any hopes for originality. What dreams I might have harbored for a new clarion call were quickly dashed when, early in my preparation of this article, I came on Eric John's comment that “more books have been written about Anglo-Saxon kingship than about Anglo-Saxon kings.” Once I got my torch alight I quickly realized how many footsteps already covered the path. And last, this article in some sense is offered as a memorial to Dorothy Whitelock, our greatest modern Anglo-Saxonist after Stenton. Though she did not live to complete her study of Alfred the Great, we have been assured that it will soon see the light of day. The frequency with which Whitelock's name appears in the bibliography gives some idea of her versatility and her relentless intellectual curiosity. To the study of kingship alone her first postwar contribution appears in the 1954 listings; her last—the reedition of her magisterial English Historical Documents, volume 1—in 1979.

The long postwar generation of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, of which we now must be standing at the far chronological end, begins with the publication of Frank Merry Stenton's Anglo-Saxon England in 1943. Stenton was sixty-three when his great book appeared. Rarely has a large synthetic treatment simultaneously presented the state of the existing question and set the agenda for the next thirty or forty years.

The genesis of the Reform Act of 1832 is still not fully understood. It has become fashionable for historians to direct their attention toward two groups of Whigs who are seen as the ultimate arbiters of policy. The first, men of high visibility such as Lords Grey and Holland, was certainly of importance. The Reform Bill prime minister was the most brilliant political tactician the Whigs had produced since Walpole. But the senior leaders of the 1830s were already becoming rather antiquated in their ideas, and men of their type and generation were generally very moderate reformers. The other group to whom historians attribute the progressive elements of Whiggism, the Edinburgh Reviewers and especially Henry Brougham, are seen as the “new men,” the radicalizers and educators of Whiggery. Yet Brougham, for example, frequently worked against the efforts of advanced Whigs to unify and strengthen the party. Indeed, he actually regretted the liberal nature of the Reform Bill. The “new men” who might have played such a role in the House of Commons, Romilly, Horner, and Whitbread, were dead by 1818, the victims of disease and madness. Mackintosh and Macaulay contributed to the party's articulation of principles but did not shape them in the 1810s and 1820s.

No peaceful steps could have been taken toward actual constitutional change without the acquiescence, indeed the active cooperation, of the great Whig magnates. No Whig government could hope to survive for long or call itself Whig without support from the great families, most of them cousins by blood or marriage, whose surnames and titles were inextricably bound up with mythology anchored in the events of 1688–89.

The America of Boston, bound from its home port to London in December of 1688, began taking soundings that were political as well as nautical as it approached England. Two weeks before an English port was reached, the first news was heard from a shipmaster returning from Barbados, who shared what he had heard earlier from an English vessel out of Galloway. The passengers of the America were told that William of Orange had landed at Torbay early in November, that the prince had taken England, and that King James was dead. The truth, the guess, and the false rumor all came aboard with equal credibility. They were only four days from port before they learned that the king was not dead, though the source was a five-week-old report from the Canary Islands. The occupants of the America could still be buffeted by strange and disturbing tales when they were only one day from Dover. The master of a pink that was two weeks out of Liverpool gave the date of the prince's landing as three weeks later than the event, gave William's force as an astounding 50,000 men and 600 ships, and told the apprehensive colonials that the drowned bodies of Englishmen were being found tied back-to-back and that French men-of-war were cruising with commissions from King James II. All this worrisome “news” proved erroneous but accompanied an account that would prove correct, that the king was not dead but had fled to France.

The Forced Loan of 1626–27 has traditionally been regarded as one of the milestones of early seventeenth-century politics. The great nineteenth-century Whig historian S. R. Gardiner saw it as the product of “new counsels” by which Charles I came increasingly to rely on the royal prerogative, and he depicted the opposition to this as a principled defense of Englishmen's liberties. Others writing in the same tradition have generally echoed these views. Thus the loan has been presented as the climax to a first stage of struggle between “Court” and “Country” or as a staging post on the “high road to Civil War.” Latterly, however, this verdict has come into question.

With the work of “localist” and “revisionist” historians we have come to appreciate more clearly the extent of attachment to the local community and the continual striving toward consensus in relations between king and subject. This has led to a general revaluation of what have traditionally been regarded as clashes of principle. Local historians have stressed that opposition to taxes generally owed far more to backsliding and provincial inertia than to any concern for constitutional propriety. And a greater understanding of the problems of administration—particularly in wartime—has led to a recognition that government decision making was often a reflex action, prompted by the immediate need to make ends meet. These insights have been incorporated into the work of Conrad Russell, who has provided the most recent assessment of the loan.

If the sacred back was not always safe from family and associates in the Anglo-Saxon period, still less was it proffered in the Norman and Angevin periods. William I endured the rebellion of one son, William II an accidental death while hunting; Henry I suppressed a baronial rebellion in favor of his feckless brother Robert Curthose; Stephen's reign was characterized by lawlessness and rebellion on behalf of Empress Matilda. Henry II found his whole family actively at war against him, Richard I met his death in a political quarrel in Aquitaine, John was constrained by a rebellion of many barons to issue Magna Carta, Henry III faced constant baronial opposition to his policies, Edward I was compelled to face magnate disquiet from 1297 to 1300, Edward II was deposed (and betrayed by his wife). Edward III alone of the kings discussed in this portion of my article reigned withal quietly (after 1341) and successfully (in terms of familial and baronial opposition, at least until 1376). This is not a happy picture, but it is one that reminds us that family relations were vital to successful kingship and that a king must, if successful, be a canny politician. Unlike Rosenthal, I have chosen to limit my discussion of royal biography for the period 1066–1377 to pointing out the sources that have appeared in print since 1945 and to book-length royal biographies; no longer is it true (in the words of Sidney Painter written in 1949 that prefaced his study of The Reign of King John) that, “when I started to write this volume, there was no adequate account of the reign of a medieval English king.

The victory of the Labour party in the British general election of July 1945 was preeminently a triumph of Left over Right. Labour won 393 seats, while the Conservatives, despite the prestige associated with their wartime leader Winston Churchill, won only 213. As the election results came in over the radio on July 26, the veteran Labour M.P. James Chuter Ede “began to wonder if I should wake up to find it all a dream.” By the end of the day, he was moved to record that the outcome of the election was “as great as 1906 … one of the unique occasions in British history—a Red Letter day in the best sense of that word.” At the same time, however, the election was of crucial importance in the development of the Left itself, especially with regard to the relationship between the Labour party and the Left as a whole.

I Labour's decisive election victory has commonly been interpreted as the climax of a long and gradual rise to power. The historian Charles Mowat was quick to point out that its success was “the culmination of a political movement now more than sixty years old.” The historic mission of the Labour party, its “fifty years' march” from tiny pressure group to majority government, was the subject of several Whiggish treatises in the following few years. Over the last decade, moreover, the increasing recent difficulties of the Labour party have tended to highlight the comparative steadiness of its earlier growth, although they have also stimulated greater attention to the early causes of later conflicts.

Debate over the nature of central-local relationships has played an important part in recent discussion of the origins and course of the English Civil War. It is an oversimplification, but not a caricature, to say that two distinct sets of views are current. The first, and in many ways the most consistent and coherent, arguments are those found in the work of the local historians who have developed the idea of the county community as the most important focus for the activities of the provincial gentry and, in more general form, in Morrill's The Revolt of the Provinces and Hutton's The Royalist War Effort. In this work a clear separation is seen between local and national issues or preoccupations. The majority of the county gentry, and still more the ranks below them, were ill informed about national developments and concerned with the activities of central government mainly as they affected the stability of their local communities. Only a small minority of activists were genuinely committed to the Royalist or the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War; the most characteristic provincial response to the divisions of 1642 was reluctance to become involved, as shown both in widespread neutralism among individuals and in collective attempts at local pacification. Gradually the whole of England was drawn, willy-nilly, into the war, but allegiance was determined largely by contingent military factors: the proximity of London or of the king's army or the relative effectiveness of the small numbers of local partisans.

Interest in the origin of Walpole's Black Act (9 Geo. 1, c. 22), or the Waltham Black Act, as it was actually called, has arisen from work by Pat Rogers and E. P. Thompson. It was an act of exceptional severity, making no less than some fifty new offenses capital, and its origins have been debated by legal as well as by political historians. While Rogers stressed the criminality of the Blacks, Thompson set the act in a sociohistorical context, suggesting that its importance was in assisting the placemen of the Hanoverian establishment and Walpole's administration to a stronger hold on lands in the Black areas, at the expense of older and smaller gentry and the usage rights of yeomen farmers, tenantry, and the poor. In Thompson's argument the Black Act has exemplary significance for the tendency of greater Whig land owners toward more efficiently exploitative procedures, backed by ferocious legislation. The involvement in Blacking of Alexander Pope's kinsmen Charles and Michael Rackett, stressed by both Rogers and Thompson, constituted a point of additional interest.

The difference between Rogers and Thompson over whether Pope felt shame at his relatives' predicament turns in part on the political dimension of Blacking. Aside from the politics of conflict over land usage, Thompson rejected a link between the Blacks and the Jacobites, even though the act was introduced in the midst of legislation against the Atterbury conspiracy.

In the last few years there has been a growth of interest in the history of crime and law enforcement in early modern Scotland. Recent studies by Stephen Davies, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker have described the intricate operation of the country's criminal justice system. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the role played by transportation. During the eighteenth century, banishing criminals to the American colonies became the most common punishment employed by higher courts. By providing a merciful alternative to the death penalty without putting the public at serious risk, transportation carried enormous appeal. An attorney in Edinburgh commented, “In many cases it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the state, and the good order of society, that the country should be rid of certain criminals.” This article seeks to explore the nature of Scottish transportation, from its growing popularity in the early 1700s to its demise in 1775, a result of the American Revolution. Questions basic to an understanding of this punishment and its operation remain unanswered. How often was it utilized by courts? How many offenders were exiled during the century? What sorts of crimes had they committed? By what means were they transported to America? How did Scottish procedure differ from the system employed in England? Answers to these questions, besides shedding new light on the internal mechanics of transportation, should open a valuable window onto the Scottish criminal justice system.

The role of the British cabinet in the Anglo-French military conversations prior to the First World War has been and remains controversial. The acrimonious debate within the government during November 1911 seems linked inextricably to the flood of angry memoirs that followed August 1914 and to the continuing historical debate over the actions and motivations of the various ministers involved. Two generations of researchers now have examined an enormous body of evidence, yet the leading modern scholars continue to publish accounts that differ on the most basic questions. Historians have proved no more able than the ministers themselves were to reconcile the contradictory statements of honorable men. The persistence of these differences in historical literature demonstrates both the continuing confusion over the cabinet's role in the military conversations and the need for a renewed effort to resolve this confusion.

The starting point for any discussion of the staff talks must be the recognition that the meaning of the term changed significantly over the nine years before the outbreak of World War I. The contacts began with a series of informal discussions between senior British and French officers during 1905. The first systematic conversations took place early in January 1906 under the authority of Lord Esher, a permanent member of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), and Sir George Clarke, the CID secretary. Later in that month a small group of ministers, including Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, sanctioned formal, ongoing exchanges between the two general staffs.