It has been nearly half a century since R. H. Tawney published Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, and in spite of many efforts to refine and to dispute Tawney's thesis, the work has retained great influence over sixteenth and seventeenth-century English historical studies. There is considerable debate over the nature of the connection between Calvinism and capitalism, but amidst this disagreement there is a basic acceptance of the idea that the Puritan “work ethic” and the development of an entrepreneurial spirit were related to each other. Tawney suggested that the Puritans' doctrine of the calling engendered a new appreciation of diligent labor and a gradually developing certainty that the wealth which resulted from diligence should be considered a measure of godly activity. Thus, Puritanism discarded the suspicion of economic motives which had been a characteristic of earlier religious reform movements:

Tawney was speaking of the “later stages” of Puritanism; he took his examples entirely from post-restoration works.

In Maitland's words, “Of all the centuries the twelfth was the most legal.” It was a time of growth for the great legal systems in the West: English common law, revived Roman law, and canon law. Students of medieval England have rarely concerned themselves with the question of the connection between these legal systems. For six centuries, from Bracton until the rise of modern legal history with Maitland, the study of English law was insular, ignoring the continental legal systems. When a seventeenth-century civilian wrote that “our common law, as we call it, is nothing else than a mixture of the Roman and the feudal,” he aroused the anger of Coke and the common lawyers. Recently scholars have taken such a view more seriously, and a number of studies have sought Roman or canonistic influences on English law. It might be useful, then, to reconsider the matter of the impact of Rome on English law in the light of recent scholarship, asking three questions: To what extent was Roman law known and studied in England before the time of Bracton? What influences, if any, do scholars find that it had on the legal innovations of Henry II and his sons? Why did the English fail to ‘receive’ Roman law in the way that countries on the Continent did?

Any influence of Roman law in England during the centuries after the withdrawal of Roman legions and before the Norman Conquest can be dismissed quickly. Once Christianity was re-introduced to the island, the revival of Roman Law, or at least of some notion of Roman legal concepts, was possible.

The crown's tenuous control over remote regions of the realm created a persistent problem in sixteenth-century England. Feudal ties and social unrest presented greatest danger in the North, but the early Tudor monarchs worried about the West as well. For one thing, the western counties were especially vulnerable to possible foreign invasion. Secondly, the internal power structure in the West included a loyal but independent gentry and a commons far from passive. In such circumstances, royal control in the West might have disappeared entirely without solid aristocratic support. King Henry VIII depended upon his cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, to provide such support during the first three decades of his reign. Until Courtenay's execution for treason in 1538, his lands and offices ensured his position as the leading aristocrat, the role which John, Lord Russell assumed in 1539.

In recent years a great deal of scholarly energy has been expended in attempts to identify differing religious parties and movements in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. On the one hand, J.F.H. New has described the actions of Anglicans and Puritans as “teleological acts – attempts to make practice conform to preconceived philosophies.” He believes that Anglican and Puritan doctrines derived from quite different conceptions of human moral capacity, conceptions which were distinct from their sixteenth-century origins and which grew more so as time passed. On the other hand, Charles and Katherine George have insisted that we can at best talk about minor differences of emphasis and of degree within a doctrinally unified “English Protestant mind” before 1640. There were, so this thesis goes, no really significant Anglican-Puritan ideological distinctions, and therefore religious differences had nothing to do with the coming of the English Civil War. The effect of these efforts has been to make historians aware that defining the terms “Anglican” and “Puritan” is a much more difficult enterprise than used to be thought. Despite the Georges' book, the terms are still being used; but New's argument about their meaning has not gone uncriticized.

It would be impossible in a short article to deal with all of the points raised in this extensive debate. The present purpose is to concentrate upon only two of many points of difference between writers traditionally identified as Anglicans and Puritans by means of their activities, attitudes, and associates.

Recently one of the most distinguished historians of Tudor and Stuart England, Lawrence Stone, distilled his extensive study and careful analysis of this era into a compact, persuasive, up-to-date account of The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. Abounding in shrewd insights, it appears destined to became the standard short introduction to the background of that event and a popular starting point for comparative studies. For these reasons, the framework of historical interpretation expounded in the Causes bears careful, explicit examination and assessment. Stone himself stressed the need for such inquiry and indicated its direction by pointing out that “the main thing which distinguishes the narrative from the analytical historian is that the former works within a framework of models and assumptions of which he is not always fully conscious, while the latter is aware of what he is doing, and says so explicitly.” One must add that the analytical historian rarely escapes from the category reserved for his narrative colleague. However, the Causes opens the way for reappraisal of a whole historiographical tradition precisely because Stone explicates portions of his explanatory framework.

Normally most historians operate from hidden assumptions which enclose the perimeters of an historiographical tradition and provide it with needed stability. While excluding other approaches, these presuppositions make detailed research possible by singling out particular hypotheses, problems, and even evidence as especially significant or legitimate. From the days of Samuel Rawson Gardiner to the present, historians as different as Gardiner and Stone have shared a set of basic assumptions about the movement of history in general, about the long term causes of the “English Revolution”, and about its nature and timing.

Some such expression as “the scientific revolution in England” is often used in referring to the period in seventeenth-century history in which, under English auspices and the leadership of mathematical scientists of whom many were English or worked in England (foremost in whose ranks was Isaac Newton), success was finally achieved in formulating quantitative, empirically sound, and predictive laws of motion. In recent years there have appeared several theories of the social and economic causes of this revolution. These theories have had a constructive effect to the extent that they have prompted serious consideration of previously ignored aspects of the history of science. However, without denying their value in this regard, they are at best inadequate. The purpose of this essay is not to review or to dispute these earlier theories but to propose an alternative to them.

At the time of the Restoration, Charles II seemed to give every indication that his first and most important alliance as King of England would be with Spain. Contemporary circumstances were such that this policy would have been logical, and Charles's behavior in 1660 encouraged Europeans to expect it. Yet, within a year of his return, Charles had not only failed to forge the Spanish alliance, he had entered into a marriage-alliance with Spain's rebellious province, Portugal. The events surrounding this apparent change of attitude encouraged the Spanish government and others to misinterpret Charles's intentions. At best, the new King was seen as a weak monarch who was lured into a comfortable dependence on Spain's natural enemy and self-appointed protector of Portugal, Louis XIV, King of France. At worst, Charles was accused of duplicity, of falsely courting Spain while maneuvering into an anti-Spanish coalition being constructed by France. In both interpretations, Charles was believed to have been seduced by the French King very early in his reign. The Portuguese alliance raises the question of the nature of Charles's foreign policy immediately after the Restoration. What were his relationships with France and Spain? What did he intend by the Portuguese alliance? The key to understanding his behavior lies in his treatment of Spain, and from an examination of his Spanish policy in light of the controversial alliance, it is possible to see both reason and consistency in Charles II's initial diplomacy.

In satire, as in lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath. Shadwell is a better playwright overall than Dryden, and Theobald a far better Shakespearean than Pope; and if Colley Cibber is a more appropriate stand-in for Dullness, few would regard Pope's treatment of him as wholly without bias. With Swift the case is even more clear. The butts of his satire were often men of the first importance, national or even international figures whose reputations were not to be shaped by satire alone. While Pope may have succeeded in imposing his version of Lord Hervey upon history, Swift's Wharton, and even more his Marlborough, now exist only in the rhetorical world of Augustan humanism.

This somewhat tenuous relation between factual accuracy and artistic success, in satiric as in other portraiture, has long been appreciated, and critics now scarcely pause to defend the ground of literal truth before retiring to their prepared positions of literary tradition and rhetorical form. In general such strategy is sound, but occasionally it does the satirist less than justice. This is decidedly the case with one of the greatest of Swift's satiric portraits, that of William Wood, the unhappy victim of the Drapier's Letters.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the role of the East India Company was significantly altered. In the early part of the century, the main thrust of Company activity was commercial, but this began to change as the French challenged British interests in India and conditions on the sub-continent demanded political and military involvement. Lucy Sutherland has summed up these changes succinctly:

That the state might owe its poor and unemployed a helping hand to emigrate to wherever there were jobs found common enough expression in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the 1820s and 1830s there were the conflicting schemes of Wilmot-Horton and E. G. Wakefield. Carlyle advocated in 1843 a state emigration service to provide a bridge to the colonies, and Irish troubles periodically provided a source of speculation about the usefulness of state emigration as a solution to agricultural distress. For Tories it could be a conservative measure to diminish at a stroke economic distress and the social disruption it bred, while some Liberals viewed it as a necessary rationalization of the labor market and supported it in the same spirit, and with the same arguments, as the Cheap Trains Act. Organized labor itself had had recourse on occasion to the emigration of members both as a restrictive guild practice and a militant trade dispute tactic.

The extent to which trade unions continued to favor emigration benefits after mid-century has been a subject of some dispute. There is also the question of trade union attitudes toward schemes of state emigration — distrusted by many in the early Victorian period as transportation of the poor. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate a strong continued interest in an emigration solution by many trade unions well into the 1880s, and that after mid-century much of organized labor turned from emphasis on emigration benefits provided by the union to acceptance of and agitation for a state program of emigration assistance funded by the national exchequer.

Edwardian England has become an increasingly significant period for scholarly research. One of the more carefully examined subjects is the interrelationship between politics and army reform. The debacles of the South African War forced the governments to examine England's army, and reforms emerged after 1901. Historians have concentrated on the efforts of Balfour's administration of 1902-05 and Haldane's sojourn at the War Office from 1906 to 1912; these periods witnessed the emergence of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the reorganization of the War Office, the shaping of the General Staff and the development of the British Expeditionary Force. All of these have been subjected to detailed examination — notably, the C. I. D. in recent works by Peter Fraser and Nicholas d'Ombrain, and the War Office by W. S. Hamer.

There is, however, at least one gap in the historical literature on politics and army reform: St. John Brodrick's term as Secretary of State for War, 1901-03. An understanding of Brodrick's activities is necessary, since he was, of course, the first War Secretary to attempt reforms as a response to the obvious shortcomings of the army in the South African War. A careful examination will explain why he failed in many of his programs, the political consequences of these failures, and some of his more positive contributions.

The breakdown of the British army in the first few months of the South African War, which began in October 1899 and ended in May 1902, shocked and dismayed both the public and the Government.

The Grenvillites were one of the more durable and long lasting of the political groups or factions which functioned within the Westminster scene during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Yet several years before the Reform Bill of 1832 substantially reduced their borough strength in the House of Commons, the Grenvillites as a group had ceased playing even a peripherally important role in the political nation. The decline of this faction illustrates one of the problems implicit in a system which places emphasis upon a great peer or wealthy Commoner acting as paterfamilias of a political clique. It is all very well when there exists an individual of some talent or even a moderate degree of gravitas to lead the group, but what will follow when an internal shift within the faction throws up a total incompetent, who neither properly prunes nor tends his preserve, to run the corporate affairs? This article will examine how such an occurrence overtook the Grenvillites during the years after 1817.

Ladies who kept private schools attended by young ladies are familiar figures in Regency and Victorian novels: ridiculous ladies, such as Miss Pinkerton, who kept a rather elegant establishment in Vanity Fair, sensible ladies like Mrs. Goddard, whose more modest school was attended by Jane Austen's Emma; scheming ladies such as Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who set her cap for Molly Gibson's father in Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Memorable mostly for their personal quirks, their qualities of character, these ladies all fit comfortably in the framework of the domestic drama.