With the recent four hundredth anniversary of the sailing of the Spanish Armada came a virtual flood of new works concerning the great invasion fleet and the English ships that opposed it. While it would seem that there would be little new to say about such a heavily researched subject, there is one aspect of this momentous year that has been received relatively short shrift by historians of the period, the national mobilization of England to meet the threatened invasion. Often referred to as the Great Muster of 1588 because one of its most important elements was the muster of the militia to fill the ranks of the army, it was an administrative feat of massive scope that involved months of preparation, extensive military planning, and precise timing. Because these arrangements were never tested in battle, however, the effectiveness of this effort is hard to judge, and its importance is often missed by historians. While Garrett Mattingly devoted an entire chapter of his well known work on the Armada year to events on land, he found the queen's visit to the army at Tilbury after the departure of the Armada more important, or at least more interesting, than the actual state of the nation's defense. More recently, Geoffrey Parker has used the discovery of a large quantity of siege equipment on an excavated armada wreck as a jumping off point for his article “If The Armada Had Landed.” Approaching the issue from the standpoint of a historian of the Army of Flanders, and leaning heavily on continental sources, he adheres to the view that England was totally unprepared for fighting on land if the Spanish had succeeded in landing troops on the island. While this view reflects the common opinion of both nineteenthand twentieth-century historians on the subject, a careful review of English sources, particularly the surviving muster records, military papers, and coastal surveys, leaves a good deal of doubt concerning the accuracy of Parker's judgment. It is the purpose of this article to examine the English side of the story of the Great Muster of 1588, by illustrating the extensive defensive preparations that were organized to face the Spanish threat.

The conception of English culture in the century that was brought to a climax in Cromwellian triumph and tragedy has suffered from a flatness of historical perception, one major cause of which has been insufficient recognition of the thought and esthetic creativity of nominal Christian and emphatically non-Puritan intellectuals and artists. We have concentrated too much on defining the novelties, indeed often inappreciable differences, that characterized pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Christian factionalism in England: Anglicanism, Puritanism, Sectarianism, Laudianism, and now Arminianism. I want instead to make a case for the neglected power, pervasiveness, and perdurability of varieties of secularism in the age of the Godly.

Although a growing number of scholars are aware of the importance of literature to the dynamics of this astonishing epoch, the redoubtable spirit of William Haller prevails still in historical efforts to reconstitute the cultural context of that literature. The pagan bedrock laid down by a century of humanist imports is obscured by the flood of ephemeral sermons and miscellaneous religious discourse. Recent literary scholarship, on the other hand, having shaken the incubus of F. R. Leavis and not yet succumbed to post-structuralism, has given us models with which to illuminate prerevolutionary English culture: the monographs of Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stephen Orgel investigate the penetration of secular humanism into literature, historical writing,and popular and court theatre. They could lead us out of the fog created by the supersaturated climate of Protestant culture.

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.

The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.

Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

A number of Victorian writers identified a change in the episcopate in the nineteenth century: Dean Burgon, for example, believed that a remodeled episcopacy emerged at this time. Historians have advanced the view that the changes were generated by the Whig ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s. Indeed it is part of the schemata of ecclesiastical history that bishops in the eighteenth century were fundamentally different from those in the nineteenth century. Yet, as C. K. Francis Brown admitted, there has been no attempt to establish a pattern of this in the career and social history of the nineteenth century episcopate. This is all the more surprising since a structuralist analysis of the Caroline and Hanoverian episcopate has existed for some years. The traditional view of Church history, that the ecclesiastical reforms of the 1830s and 1840s were the principal engine of change, have tended to overlook the structural changes in bishops' career patterns and that there was a change in the concept of the episcopal function. The context of this changed concept of episcopal duty is important. Recent work on the professionalization of the clergy has focused on the immediate impact of the Reformation and the development of the Church as a profession up to the early eighteenth century. Rosemary O'Day and Geoffrey Holmes have demonstrated that between 1580 and 1730 the clerical profession became increasingly stratified. The overpopulation of the clergy in the eighteenth century accelerated this trend, establishing a Church in which there were extremes of wealth and poverty. At the same time the clergy were subject to greater lay control than any other emergent profession. This tension between professionalization and institutions of the state has been examined in other occupations, but throughout the nineteenth century it grew stronger in the Church. From patronage of a living to nomination to a see, laity dominated the Church. In spite of Whig reforms of the 1830s and 1840s lay control established strict parameters within which the professionalization of the episcopate occurred. The effect of control from outside the Church was that the paths to the bench of bishops remained more numerous and varied than the limited paths to the elite of other professions like the judiciary. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also saw functional trends that brought about the professionalization of the clergy. These changes have been thoroughly analyzed by Anthony Russell. The self-conscious spirituality of the Tractarian movement also effected changes in the popular view of the clerical function, and the episcopate was not immune to these changes. By the closing decades of the nineteenth-century bishops were appointed whose careers had been touched by these trends. Equally important were developments within the episcopate that altered the bishops' roles.

In June 1914 David Lloyd George, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer, capitulated to opposition from within his own party and withdrew from the Budget for 1914–15 his proposals to revise the system of Exchequer grants to local authorities and to establish land value rating. Withdrawal was a considerable political humiliation for Lloyd George. “His stock stands low in the party,” commented his friend, Lord Riddell, in his diary. “The Budget has been a fiasco.” What went wrong with the 1914 Budget is the concern of this article.

Lloyd George's 1914 Budget incorporated two distinct strategies. The first comprised a fiscal strategy designed to provide in a single “taxing” Budget for the needs of both the Navy and the reorganization of local government finance and taxation. The second constituted part of a wider political strategy intended to furnish a reform program that would enable the Liberals to make a powerful progressive appeal at the next general election, due by the end of 1915. The first was supposed to serve the second, but in the event had the opposite result. It prompted Lloyd George to abandon his original plan of building up to a major reform Budget in 1915 and to proceed instead to include in the 1914 Budget “provisional” grants to local authorities before he had prepared the groundwork, administratively, legislatively or politically, for a new system of grants and rating. At all levels, the enterprise was premature, and simply presented a group of discontented wealthy Liberals in the Commons with the opportunity to stage an effective protest against the direction of Liberal finance.