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.

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.