This paper approaches a large problem — the changing image of late Anglo-Saxon kingship — from a very limited perspective. In later work I hope to study Alfred's changing image as a symbol of kingship within its broader political context. This paper is limited to studying the changing relationship between Crown and monastery, as illustrated by the portrayal of King Alfred in a pair of late-Saxon saint's lives.

Historians owe most of their knowledge of King Alfred to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser's Life of Alfred, both generally agreed to be products of Alfred's own court. Given the detail of these works and their status as “official histories,” it might be expected that all subsequent treatments of King Alfred depend on them. Yet the most popular episode of Alfred's life, the one still known by every English schoolchild, is the story of Alfred and the cakes, which occurs nowhere in these authoritative sources. In fact, by the end of the tenth century King Alfred emerges in literary contexts far from the West Saxon court, engaging in activities that are certainly not recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle or the Life of Alfred. What had taken place to give Alfred this life of his own outside of the official histories?

The search for the origins of modern democratic institutions, institutions grounded in what philosophers call “legitimation by consent,” has led historians far upstream into numerous tributaries. Francis Oakley argues that the institutional, practical, and political world in which Romano-canonist theories of consent were actually put to the test, could be found in ecclesiastical communities, the feudal contract, the conciliar movement, and “a myriad of corporate bodies and of cities enjoying de facto an extensive measure of self-governance.” The medieval English village was certainly one of the most important of these corporate bodies. As early as 1933, following in the path of the great nineteenth-century constitutional historians, A. B. White looked in the direction of the medieval village for indications of nascent institutions of self government. However, White devalued the significance of his own findings by arguing that this “self-government” developed in response to the needs of royal administrators, and was, in the end, overshadowed by the centralized power of a Tudor regime. White thus saw village institutions of self government as responses on the part of a local population to “the King's command.”

Andrew Marvell's “An Horatian ode upon Cromwel's return from Ireland” may not be the most famous seventeenth-century poem but it is perhaps the most enigmatic. Its elusive, haunting quality defies any strict interpretation, and, as Blair Worden has recently indicated, the poem refuses to fall neatly into any simple “royalist” or “Cromwellian” category. Rather, the “Horatian Ode” has the aspect of a cultural artifact, having captured and held the historical moment that tore asunder two ages: the pre-1649 past of hereditary monarchy with its confidence in the traditions bequeathed by time, and the immediate post-1649 future, when the English state was to be governed by brute strength and naked power. As such, it has become a testament to the “fundamental shift in English civilization, that when every reservation has been made, the middle of the seventeenth century brought about.” For Worden “An Horatian Ode,” with its ambivalent stance of neither approval nor condemnation of the rise of Cromwell, epitomizes the state of Renaissance poetry before T. S. Eliot's much lamented “disassociation of sensibility” took place.

In the past twenty years there has been a renaissance in Jacobite studies in Britain and North America. It started with the publication in 1970 of Romney Sedgwick's The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754, in which the post-1715 Tory party was resurrected from the untimely death to which earlier historiography had consigned it in the face of the so-called Whig hegemony under Walpole and his successors. This section of Sedgwick's volumes was the work of Eveline Cruickshanks, who not only showed that there had been an active Tory party under Walpole, but also claimed that it had been essentially a Jacobite party. Dr. Cruickshanks has, since 1970, produced a book, several articles, and essays expanding her thesis. She has been joined in the quest for Jacobites by many others, and the flow of work on Jacobitism seems unabated. This body of work has, however, left other historians with a good deal of unease, not only over the conclusions reached, but also the methodology used and the sources upon which these conclusions are based (most notably the uncritical use of the Stuart Papers in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle).

The licentious career of Caroline of Brunswick, the most notorious queen in modern British history, was only exceeded by that of her husband, George IV, and the scandal that emerged when he attempted to obtain a divorce inspired one of the most unusual episodes of nineteenth-century British history. For six months the attention of the country was focused on the queen's trial; massive demonstrations in her support were familiar sights in London streets and news of the matter dominated the columns of the press. The popular outpouring of support for the queen often took the form of reviling the king and his ministers, and revolution seemed to be in the air, yet because no lasting political change resulted from this tumult, historians have tended to dismiss the affair as relatively unimportant. However, to view this interlude primarily in terms of party politics is to overlook the fact that the majority of the people who formed the massive crowds that so alarmed the government were neither radicals nor reformers, and many, if not most of them were unenfranchised. In order to better understand the implications of this unrest, it is important to identify those factors that inspired British men and women to openly denigrate their ruler and to heap opprobrium on the members of government in defense of a woman who, ironically, many believed to be guilty as charged. Such an examination makes it clear that this was an event of profound cultural significance and was in some respects the first wide-spread popular expression of the moral standards that have come to be labelled “Victorian.”

Any attempt to judge “public opinion” is fraught with difficulty. Most of the surviving journals, memoirs, and collections of letters from this period were written by members of the gentry and aristocracy; most of the middle and working-class people who actively demonstrated in support of the queen or who signed the numerous addresses sent to her have tended to remain silent and anonymous. Newspaper and other written accounts of the affair were often extremely partisan, for British society was sharply divided on this issue. Political caricatures, however, overcome some of these difficulties.