The most familiar view of party, and one held almost universally for a century and a half, sees a continuity in party history from the Whigs and Tories of Charles II's reign to the Liberals and Conservatives of Victoria's. This view received its classic expression at the hands of Macaulay, and with him it was a verdict arrived at before he even began The History of England and more than thirty years before he finished with it. In an election speech at Edinburgh in 1839 he proudly traced his Whig ancestry back to the Roundheads of the time of Charles I. In the opening section of the History he was more specific and selected a certain day in October of 1641 for the birth of the modern party system. “From that day,” he wrote, “dates the corporate existence of the two parties which have ever since alternately governed the country.”

Macaulay was not the first historian to reach such a conclusion. Writing some twenty years earlier the Catholic John Lingard, in dealing with the 1678-1681 crisis over Exclusion of the Duke of York, wrote that “it was during this period that the appellations of Whig and Tory became permanently affixed to the two great political parties which for a century and a half [1680-1830] have divided the nation.” Even before the turn of the nineteenth century the same idea had been suggested by Thomas Somerville in his History of England which appeared in 1792.

Some thirty years ago A. H. Thompson, writing on war in the Middle Ages, concluded that “European warfare in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shews [sic] a somewhat bewildering variety of practice behind which lies no constructive idea.” This was a mild verdict indeed, for at the time Thompson wrote it was commonplace to condemn the generals of the Middle Ages for every sin in the military lexicon, whether of commission or omission, from mere stupidity to utter incompetence. This contempt for medieval generalship can, as a matter of fact, be traced back to the sixteenth century and Machiavelli's denunciations of the condottieri captains. There were, of course, certain exceptions to be noted, but they were cited only to prove that occasionally a flash lit up the general gloom. Thus, William the Conqueror's masterly campaign of September-December 1066 had long been recognized; Edward IV was sometimes referred to as “the first modern general;” J. E. Morris established the reputation of Edward I as a tactical innovator; and Robert I, the Bruce, was admitted by even so contemptuous a critic as Sir Charles Oman to have laid down a proper strategy for the conduct of operations against the English. And, scattered here and there throughout the vast literature on the Middle Ages are indications of a vague awareness that perhaps the generalship of the period was not so lacking in purpose and professional competence as had generally been alleged. It is necessary only to recall B. H. Liddell Hart's scathing comments on the military high commands of World War I to be reminded that generals of all ages have been subject to searching post facto criticism.

By 1648 in England many of parliament's supporters believed that peace was as far away as ever. The members of parliament who had declared they were fighting to rescue the king from the hands of his evil counsellors may have rethought their views about the personal responsibility of the king, but they still believed that the only viable settlement would be one based upon agreement between king and parliament. Consequently they had dispatched, with wearisome monotony, negotiators and messengers with propositions for peace to the king. Their initiatives were always destroyed in the last resort because Charles refused the terms offered, but apart from governing without him for the time being, the members of parliament could think of nothing else but a settlement based on agreement with Charles. The political thinking of the majorities in both Houses was bound by convention: a king was essential. Outside parliament, pamphleteers had questioned the importance of the king, but parliament's view was not seriously threatened until 1647 when it showed itself incapable of settling the kingdom and the Army showed a willingness to intervene in politics. The outbreak of the second Civil War in 1648 convinced the soldiers that parliament's policies of either seeking terms with the king or of ignoring him were alike futile and dangerous. So long as Charles remained alive, at the center of royalist hopes, so long would wars continue and lives be lost. At this point the Army spoke of the king in a new way.

The influential Wellek and Warren, in their Theory of Literature, view biography as the servant of a scholarly master. They concede that certain biographies have their own “intrinsic interest,” but the main bias of their work is towards the perception of biography as a quarry from which facts are to be mined and then put to other uses.

There seems to be little doubt that for the majority of biographies Wellek and Warren are correct, and their conclusions readily find support among the most serious surveys of the biographical tradition. Yet a disinterested bystander would surely observe with great curiosity how frequently in our age older and apparently outmoded factual mines are replaced by new ones. Moreover, he would surely be puzzled as he scrutinized the biographical scene more carefully and discovered in the background a number of works written between 1640 and 1851, which retain a perennial fascination and freshness and show no signs of becoming outmoded, despite numerous objections that they are unreliable and generally untrue. These works, which shall be called primary organic biographies, are defined below and include Walton's Lives, Burnet's Life of Hale and his Life of Rochester, Johnson's Life of Savage and his “Life of Thomson,” Goldsmith's Life of Nash, Boswell's Life of Johnson, and Carlyle's Life of Sterling.

Universally regarded as works of art but castigated in varying degrees for the alleged unreliability of their facts and thus for their departure from the straight and narrow path of truth, the primary organic biographies are part of a tradition that critics have consistently failed to understand.

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.

This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.

Edward III's foreign ambitions, which in 1337 precipitated the Hundred Years' War, generated such severe financial pressures at home that eventually the fiscal crisis became a political one. Exasperated by the inability or unwillingness of the government of regency under Archbishop Stratford to provide him with money and matériel for his continental campaign, an outraged Edward returned to England on November 30, 1340, determined to purge the government of those corrupt and disloyal officials whom he blamed for his humiliation. The attack on the chief ministers, especially Stratford, who was both primate and principal councillor, created a political crisis of considerable proportions, wherein some dominant issues of medieval English politics — the liberties of the church and clergy and the role of the baronage in political decision-making — were re-stated and re-argued. Modern historians have focused their attention on the more dramatic aspects of the crisis of 1341, particularly its “constitutional” implications. Lapsley, Clarke, and Wilkinson, for instance, examined the conflicts of the king with Stratford and with the baronage — events reminiscent of the confrontations of Henry II with Thomas Becket and of Edward II with the Lancastrians. Tout explained the administrative reforms of the early part of Edward III's reign, which, by subjecting the great offices of state to the control of the king's itinerant household, were designed to transform the administrative system into a device for purveying supplies and cash to feed the English war-machine. More recently, E. B. Fryde has described the ordinary and extraordinary financial techniques employed to subsidize the king's expensive foreign policies.

Serious study of the origins of the jury began in the time of William Stubbs and F. W. Maitland, when the work of the German historical school of jurisprudence reached England. Until then knowledge of the medieval English jury before the time of Henry II had been more legendary than real. William Blackstone had traced the common law to a compilation that King Alfred supposedly commanded to be made. Blackstone had written in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, “Some authors have endeavoured to trace the original of juries up as high as the Britons themselves, the first inhabitants of our island; but certain it is that they were in use among the earliest Saxon colonies.”

In the mid-nineteenth century the Anglo-Saxon origin of the jury was still a popular legend in England, but the German school of legal history sought a more scientific study of the problem. A representative of that group, Heinrich Brunner, in his book, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, rejected the traditional teaching that the jury was Germanic and popular in origin. Instead, he believed it to be royal in origin, an authoritarian means of gathering information, particularly information of a financial nature. It first appeared as the inquest of the Frankish kings, inherited from the imperial Roman fisc. It passed from them to the Norman dukes and then was introduced to England with William. According to Brunner the Norman kings reserved this fact-finding technique for themselves, extending it to their subjects in only a few cases.

During the later Middle Ages in England both church and state were multiplying their pretensions and powers. The growth of spiritual and temporal administration alike depended upon the availability of bureaucrats willing and able to serve the two powers in the fields of finance, law, administration, and diplomacy. In the absence of cash for paying for services of this kind, popes, prelates, and princes developed means for subsidizing their civil services from sources of revenue to which they were able to invent and enforce claims. This reliance upon the community of the clergy for official service and upon benefices of the church for their maintenance and compensation had the effect of coloring certain ecclesiastical offices down to the Reformation. Prebendal canonries, archdeaconries, and even parish churches came to be viewed more and more as simply sources of emolument — as sinecures to be bestowed upon members of the clergy for the performance of services other than those demanded by the offices given them. For identical reasons English kings, Roman popes, and native prelates laid claim to a variety of ecclesiastical offices and the revenues attached to them in order to obtain the services and skills without which neither church nor state could function effectively in the increasingly complex world of the later Middle Ages. All of this is, of course, well known, and modern scholars have explored rather thoroughly the composition and growth of royal and ecclesiastical administration and the major ways in which each was subsidized.

The theory behind the Henrician religious settlement was that certain papal and episcopal powers of jurisdiction were vested in the Crown by parliamentary enactments because the Pope and the English bishops had failed to reform abuses in the Church. In the absence of an alternative administrative system, the bishops continued to govern the Church as agents of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy. Although some episcopal powers of jurisdiction were returned to the Elizabethan bishops, the actual authority allowed them did not suffice to effect a reformation or to enforce conformity to the established church. In order to resolve this crisis of episcopal authority the seventeenth-century prelates and divines elaborated theories of divine-right episcopacy, but the Elizabethan bishops found it more expedient to fall back upon extraordinary grants of royal authority contained in ecclesiastical commissions.

I

The Henrician and Edwardian alienations of episcopal jurisdiction are spectacular and dramatic, yet the erosion of episcopal authority began long before the Henrician Reformation. For over two centuries English bishops had been primarily royal servants. They were, by temperament and training canonists and diplomats rather than pastors; like the Renaissance popes they had grown accustomed to compromise rather than providing spiritual leadership. Not only in England, but throughout Western Europe, bishops rarely sat as judges in their own courts. Much of their authority had been permanently delegated to commissaries, who tended to become independent agents. They were, moreover, hard put to resist encroachments upon their ordinary authority by archdeacons and cathedral chapters, while ecclesiastical corporations devoted considerable effort to securing exemption from episcopal visitations.

Students of the industrial revolution now generally admit what seemed obvious to Samuel Garbett, the Birmingham manufacturer and lobbyist, two hundred years ago; namely, that the state was an important participant in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Many scholars still emphasize the restraint of English government — a restraint which gave relatively free play to natural economic forces and to individual genius, a restraint which also aggravated the social repercussions of so momentous a transformation. But they recognize that entrepreneurs could obtain legal sanction for enclosures, canals, and a myriad of other “improvements' easily and at moderate cost by means of a private act of parliament, and they debate whether existing patent law stimulated invention by providing adequate rewards for the inventor or aimed primarily at discouraging stultifying monopoly. Because the processes of growth in the last decades of the century were so fundamental and pervasive, fiscal, commercial, colonial, and foreign policies were bound to have an impact on the embryonic industrial economy. Whether government by its various acts encouraged or impeded growth is open to debate at a number of levels. There can be no doubt, however, that politicians endeavored, if sometimes slowly and haphazardly, to adapt policy and law to changing conditions and that their decisions did affect the tempo and quality of growth.

In 1876, and again from 1894 to 1896, thousands of Christians in Bulgaria and Armenia, then provinces of the Ottoman Empire, were massacred by Turkish troops, local irregulars known with romantic barbarity as bashi-bazouks, and Moslem tribesmen. The victims were raped or mutilated, many were burned alive. Weeks later streets were littered with corpses. The Armenians, even in the best of times, were subjected to an almost systematic starvation: Moslem tribesmen were permitted to take the crops of Armenian farms when times were peaceful, and to burn them in periods of violence. Naturally such treatment provoked insurrections, which renewed the cycle of repression.

These massacres drove a section of the English public to peaks of moral indignation. Nonconformist ministers and liberal academics, and their followers, were imbued with a reverence for the independent individual. High church clergy had rediscovered a religious affinity with the ancient Churches of the Near East. Humanitarian concern for the sufferings of one's fellow men – prison inmates and child laborers at home, for example, or slaves abroad – had been a steady force in the nineteenth century, and fortified these sectarian sensitivities. These Englishmen would have been distressed by the Ottoman massacres even if the British Government had been in no way involved. Since they believed the Government to be in fact gravely responsible, they conducted extensive political agitations.

Britain was the foremost defender of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

In his recent examination of licensed absenteeism and proctorial representation in the Edwardian house of lords, Professor Vernon F. Snow sustained and elaborated the thesis which he first postulated in an earlier article on the upper house in Henry VIII's reign. He claimed that these procedures benefited both the Crown and the individual member. They permitted the latter to secure leave of absence in the case of bona fide personal difficulties — sickness, age, poverty — yet to retain, in the person of his proctor, a voice in the affairs of the house. At the same time they satisfied the Crown. They committed the licensee to decisions taken in his absence. They could be used to authorize the royal servant to remain at his post. And above all they enabled the Crown, through the privy council, to control the House of Lords. The procurators “possessed latent power in proportion to the number of proxies they held.” As the great majority of proxies were concentrated in the hands of councillors, the Crown was able to control proceedings in the upper house through a large, perhaps majority, bloc of committed spokesmen and voters. The arithmetical essense of Snow's thesis is that parliamentary power in the Lords, whether it be of the individual or of the Crown, increased in direct proportion to the number of proxies held. The council's possession of most of them constituted a power additional to the traditional devices for influencing the composition of the upper house and the distribution of power within it: the ennoblement or promotion of faithful lords temporal, the translation or deprivation of obstinate lords spiritual, detention or the denial of writs from prominent opponents of the Crown.

The key to early Renaissance thought in England has often, and rightly, been sought in that twilight zone which is both medieval and modern in character, yet is, in a sense, neither. In that indistinct area the early Tudor view of society expressed in the concept of the “very and true commonweal” constitutes a prominent but equivocal landmark. Any student of the period knows that the idea was conservative, even reactionary in its implications, inspired in large part by a suspicious distaste for the changes that were taking place in early sixteenth-century England. Those, on the other hand, who have read at all carefully the comments made by these same Englishmen on the state of their own society know that they accepted in varying degrees the facts of change, subjected them to an often searching analysis, and in several important instances arrived at constructive policies on the basis of their analysis of social cause. What, then, is one to make of this paradox presented by constructive realism deployed in the cause of a reactionary social ideal, exploration of change conducted within an ostensibly static framework? Perhaps, as with so many aspects of early Renaissance thought, the difficulty is more apparent than real. Perhaps the commonwealth idea was not so nearly static as it appeared. Perhaps, indeed, the traditional formulas in which it ordinarily found expression simply mask a new sense of change, a dawning awareness of social process.

Failure to understand the true nature of the ambivalence that seems at times to be built into the thought of the period, failure in particular to allow for the divergence between traditional theory, part of the rich legacy of medieval thought, and fresh attitudes prompted by actual experience in a time of revolutionary change, has too often resulted in failure also to appreciate the significance of the early Tudor pamphleteers and commentators of various sorts who examined their society with an eye both critical and constructive.