The resurgence of oligarchies in England's provincial towns during the fifteenth century and their firm control over almost all aspects of civic life during the sixteenth century has received considerable attention and is apparently beyond dispute. The characteristic feature of this oligarchical control was the domination of the important civic offices by urban dynasties whose members practiced the most influential and lucrative trades, were the most affluent citizens, and were linked by close family ties. Comparatively few studies have been made of officeholders of the seventeenth century, especially for the period after 1660, yet the evidence so far accumulated suggests that officeholding remained the exclusive privilege of a closed social elite. Nevertheless, Norwich may provide an instructive exception. An examination of the pool of men eligible for political office in Norwich, the largest provincial capital, indicates that the door to political office was open to men of diverse social backgrounds and occupations to a greater extent than during the sixteenth century and apparently much more so than in the other large provincial capitals.

Oligarchy may be defined as the possession and exercise of power by a few individuals either directly, as a consequence of holding the important political offices, or indirectly, as a consequence of controlling recruitment of officeholders and influencing their decisions. In the former case, which was the general pattern establishsed in those fifteenth and sixteenth-century towns which remained free from the intervention of territorial magnates, oligarchy implies further that the magistrates have either the exclusive privilege of appointing their own replacements or the ability to manipulate the mechanism of political recruitment involving a wider electorate through control of the processes of nomination and election of officeholders.

At the turn of the century the temperance question ranked among the handful of public issues which dominated British politics. It aroused powerful pressure groups which insinuated themselves in the political process at every level from constituency to Cabinet. The politics of drink raises difficult questions about the effectiveness and style of these temperance and trade pressure groups, the internal dissension which sometimes dissipated their influence, and their relationship with political parties and factions at a time of uncertain allegiances and narrow pluralities. The temperance question worried the Conservatives intermittently, the Liberals incessantly. It strengthened the Liberty Party, strained it, and sometimes threatened to shatter it.

Paradoxically at a time of decline in per capita consumption of alcohol, the temperance movement gathered impressive new support and the beleaguered drink trade achieved unprecedented political effectiveness. The dominant tradition in the temperance movement, that of the prohibitionist activists, was rooted in a hatred of drink as innately and infectiously evil, a force destructive of everything good, and in a Christian humanitarian concern for the security of the home. Many moderate reformers who did not look upon drink as sinful in itself or share the ideology of the teetotal home also worried about the effect of heavy drinking on the country.

Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary from 1895 to 1903 in the Salisbury administration, remains a subject of controversy for historians largely because of his role in the Jameson Raid. Just as his contemporary protagonists and antagonists, known as Unionists and pro-Boers, marshalled official and unofficial documents to support their cases, so have historians of recent times. There is a difference, however, between the historians writing in Chamberlain's era and those whose work is of recent date. At the turn of the century historians and polemicists had to depend upon official Blue Books and popular sources, while recent historians have had access to more extensive forms of evidence, such as personal letters and memoirs, edited and unedited diaries, and unexpurgated governmental records. Access to original sources, although it has not resolved differences in interpretation, has enabled Jean van der Poel to construct a good case for Joseph Chamberlain's complicity in the Jameson Raid. Van der Poel defines complicity as Chamberlain's foreknowledge of, failure to stop, and alleged advice in favor of the Johannesburg uprising and the Rhodes-Jameson plan, which she argues were integral parts of the same master scheme that set off the Raid. Similarly, historians of the earlier period, although precluded by lack of evidence from asking all of Van der Poel's questions and although not inclined to link the Raid and uprising into a single master plan, did, with few exceptions, address themselves to the question of Chamberlain's responsibility as an accomplice of the Raid and uprising.

The life of James Harrington is singularly ill-documented. None of his manuscripts is known to survive; he makes few and insignificant appearances in the state papers of his time; and though he was clearly a sociable and talkative man, in an age when scholars and writers all knew one another and wrote letters which they kept, correspondence from, to or about him is altogether lacking. Apart from the personal reminiscences of John Aubrey (who knew him well) and a few details from Thomas Herbert, we depend for our knowledge of his life on information supplied through John Toland, deist and literary adventurer, who edited his works in 1699-1700. It seems that a sister, Lady Assheton, formed a collection of papers by and concerning her brother, which entered the possession of a younger half-sister, Dorothy, the wife of James Bellingham, then of Levens Hall in Westmoreland. She was alive in 1699, though no longer living at Levens, and made the Assheton collection available to Toland. He found there, and published, a number of Harrington's manuscript writings, and we must suppose that the detail he gives of Harrington's life and circumstances is based either on personal information from Dorothy Bellingham or on material from Lady Assheton's papers. But whether these still exist is unknown, and though some of Toland's statements can be corroborated and few have been proved wrong, there is a great deal of what he says which is very hard to test against independent evidence. This state of affairs is especially unsatisfying when one is trying to reconstruct an account of the intellectual and political situation in which works were read and responded to by their first public; for it is here that Toland (though a serious and conscientious editor), writing forty years later with strong ideological prepossessions of his own, is least likely to be of help.

On January 6, 1649 the House of Commons set its seal of approval on the agency by which Charles I would be tried and sentenced to death. By an Act “for erecting of a High Court of Justice for the Trying and Judging of Charles Stuart, King of England,” he was charged with “a wicked design totally to subvert the ancient and fundamental laws and liberties of this nation, and, in their place, to introduce an arbitrary and tyrannical government.” The Commons maintained that they had shown tolerance toward such “high and treasonable offenses.” But the King's persistence in perverse activities — his raising of “new commotions, rebellions and invasions” — had forced them to take the present course. They were determined that no future ruler should “presume traitorously or maliciously to imagine or contrive the enslaving or destroying of the English nation, and to expect impunity for so doing.” The measure designated one hundred and thirty-five persons to try and adjudge the royal defendant.

Thus came into being the most extraordinary judicial body to be met with in English history. Certainly, no court has ever been so vigorously disclaimed as to jurisdiction, or so bitterly vilified as to personnel. To the Cavaliers, who had fought for Charles at Marston Moor and Naseby, as well as to the Presbyterians, who had trooped under the banners of Parliament to reshape, but not destroy, the monarchy, the court and its works were anathema.

The British General Election of May 1929 was a disaster for Stanley Baldwin's Government. The Conservatives lost 155 seats in all and in consequence became the second largest party in the House of Commons for the first time since the General Election of December 1910. The formation of a Labour Government appeared to be so unavoidable that the Prime Minister did not even wait to meet Parliament but resigned office at once, advising King George V to send for Ramsay MacDonald.

In attempting to explain this Conservative failure, historians have tended to stress the persistence of the unemployment problem and the alleged folly of Baldwin in choosing “Safety First” as his campaign slogan. Even a cursory examination of the Government's record during 1927 and 1928, however, lends support to the suspicion that a succession of controversial decisions in the field of foreign affairs may also have contributed, albeit marginally, to the magnitude of the Conservative failure in 1929. Certainly more than one well-wisher thought it necessary to warn the Conservative cabinet that its conduct of foreign policy — and especially those aspects relating to international disarmament negotiations — might have significant electoral implications. For example, on October 12, 1928, the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir William Tyrrell, wrote to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Lord Cushendun:

In 1887, Joseph Chamberlain wrote a letter to The Baptist in which he blamed the preoccupation of Liberals and Radicals with Home Rule for delaying social reform. “Thirty-two millions of people,” he complained, “must go without much-needed legislation because three millions are disloyal.” Early in the 1890s, socialists and militant working-class spokesmen sometimes took up this cry to express their discontent with the Liberal party. And in later years, the Liberal-Radical commitment to Home Rule provided one of the main historical explanations for the founding of an independent working-class party; thus the dampening of Radicalism supposedly caused by Home Rule has been regarded as the source of the most important political transformation of recent British history. In the words of G. D. H. Cole:

D. A. Hamer, in a recent article, takes essentially the same view, with some modifications. The Liberals, he says, took up Home Rule in a deliberate attempt to paper over confusion and disagreement within the party over other policies. In the 1880s, the Liberal party tended to be dominated by “faddists,” who could not agree on the precedence to be given various reform proposals.

The canonization of Thomas More in May 1935 was not greeted with universal approbation. According to one writer, the ceremony “was met by an official boycott in the English press and Parliament as well as in the Universities.” Though such a statement is not wholly justified, it must be granted that in a large segment of the British press, coverage of the canonization was minimal and hostile. The hostility was partly inspired by disapproval in some quarters at More's silence over the issue of Henry VIII's ecclesiastical supremacy. On this score there were charges that he was at best an “unsatisfactory saint” or a “negative martyr.” Typical of this attitude was the moderate statement of Ernest Barker a few months after More achieved Sainthood: “More, in the final trial of his faith, was obstinately silent about his real thoughts …. There is something negative in this attitude …. More died for the right of a free conscience — provided it were silent. But is a free conscience which keeps silent really free?”

For some scholars, however, the doubts concerning More's canonization ran deeper than mere disapproval of his silence on the supremacy issue, and centered rather on his alleged mistreatment of heretics (chiefly in the period 1526-34). Certainly the sixteenth-century Reformers regarded More as a persecutor. The Chronicler Edward Hall described him as “a great persecutor of such as detested the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.” Fox in his Book of Martyrs represented him as “blinded in the zeal of popery” to all humane considerations in the treatment of Lutherans.

The last published work of Garrett Mattingly, The “Invincible” Armada and Elizabethan England in the Folger Library series of “Booklets on Tudor and Stuart Civilization,” demonstrates his remarkable clarity of perception as a historian and his capacity for presenting fresh and original conclusions based on new factual research. This booklet is by no means a summary of the information in his full-length study, The Armada, published in 1959. On the contrary, it contains several new points of view developed since the publication of the earlier book, and it will stand as a model of succinct historical analysis, written with such ease and charm that a casual reader may not realize that it has far greater significance than many a ponderous tome.

Mattingly was in many ways an old-fashioned historian who showed no interest in, or regard for, current fads in historical interpretation. Controversies that mean so much to many would-be revisionists today — and mar so much contemporary historical writing — found no reflection in Mattingly's works. Yet few historians of this generation exceeded him in the quality and quantity of new knowledge that he unearthed and the significance of the interpretations that this knowledge made obvious. Mattingly was a revisionist, but the revisions that he made were based on factual information that nobody else had previously shown the ingenuity or the diligence to discover. Mattingly did not spin an hypothesis from his own brain and then go in search of something to prove it.

To those who recall Christopher Hill's brilliant cameo of Oliver Cromwell, published on the tercentenary of his death, the title of this short article may seem surprising; for Hill then uncovered a series of Cromwellian contradictions: a confusion of intentions that were both revolutionary and conservative; long hesitations coupled with swift, decisive actions; apparent hypocrisy yet patent sincerity; a man who could extend the right hand of fellowship to the lower classes but not the franchise. Cromwell is perennially elusive, a riddle about whom few authorities would dare to whisper what A. L. Rowse has admitted of Sir Walter Raleigh: “I feel … that I have got him.” Like Browning's heaven, a full understanding of the man may stand forever just beyond reach; even so the search for novel patterns and fresh approaches is bound to continue.

Despite the title, this note does not intend to subvert Hill's conclusions. Instead it begins where he ended, and seeks to carry his method of paradoxology further — to prospect for sources of ambivalence in Cromwell's theology rather than in his politics or in his social background to see whether the results might not unravel some of the apparent ambiguities of his practice.

It could be objected that the better way to understand Cromwell is “existentially rather than essentially”: one should look to his career rather than his creed and analyse his specific decisions in the context of the crises that usually accompanied them. But this approach has been tried and tried again, and still the results are inconclusive.

The roots of franchise reform in the seventeenth century are of interest to historians both of Britain and of America. In the new world and in England important steps toward democratic suffrage were taken in the first half of the century. The Virginia charter of 1619 granted voting privileges to all adult male inhabitants regardless of property. Later governments qualified this liberality, but an important precedent was established. In England Leveller tracts and the classic Putney Debates aired arguments that bore no immediate practical fruits but that foreshadowed later reforms. Both developments are startling enough to raise urgent questions about origins. Where did such striking innovations come from? Were they altogether unprecedented, or were they, as seems more probable, modifications of already existing ideas about suffrage?

In both cases tentative explanations have been proposed. The generous provisions of the Virginia charter have been accounted for by the desire of the colony's sponsors to attract settlers. Unusual political privileges were a lure to draw Englishmen to the new world. The soldiers' insistence on a wider franchise has been attributed to three factors: the confidence they derived from their large role in Cromwell's victories, the logical development of the natural right and contract theory of government, and the democratic impulse implicit in Puritan Independency. Heady with military successes and religious zeal, the soldiers boldly carried the conception of contract to its conclusion and demanded that Parliament be elected by the people to whom it was theoretically responsible.

Who were the Independents? This is one of the unsolved puzzles of the English Civil War. Contemporaries gave differing answers. To some they were the godly; to others they were “the godly gang.” They were both a Puritan group and a political segment of the Long Parliament. S. R. Gardiner and the Whig historians tended to make a clear connection. Religious Independency was for toleration, and the political Independents were, simpliciter, the party of toleration opposed to the intolerant Presbyterians. This view was broadly accepted until 1938 when it was permanently shattered by J. H. Hexter, whose penetrating article showed that many political Independents (and for this purpose he defined them as the Regicides and those who survived Pride's Purge) were elders in the established church which after the Westminster Assembly had a Presbyterian form of government. He therefore urged that the term Independent was really a label for the most ardent political Puritans applied to them by the more conservative.

Then in 1953 H. R. Trevor-Roper in his brilliant essay on “the Gentry” introduced a new approach by equating the Independents with the lesser and declining gentry who had been shut out from the spoils of court office and therefore pursued a policy of decentralization.

It was at this stage that I wrote an introductory study on the problem of the Independents that questioned in part the suggestions put forward in both these works. Against Hexter I urged that the term Independent had a greater religious content that he allowed, for many of his “Independent” Presbyterian elders in fact became Independents in religion or certainly veered in that direction.

English literary history is full of the colorful individualists variously referred to as “characters,” “personalities,” or “eccentrics”; and the literary scene in eighteenth-century England had its full share of “originals,” to use Tobias Smollett's term. They ranged from the tendentious clergymen (Conyers Middleton, William Warburton, William Stukeley) to the Grub Street hacks (John Dennis, John Trenchard) to profligate rakehells (Charles Churchill, John Wilkes) and artistocratic dilettantes (the Duke of Chandos, the Earl of Eglinton, and scores more). Though some of these men wrote prodigious amounts — notably Middleton, Warburton, and Dennis — most of them are known today largely because they drew the anger of Alexander Pope and were amberized in The Dunciad or because Dr. Johnson dissected their opinions or because Boswell encountered them in his serendipitous career and recorded the fact in his Journals. A few of them, like Wilkes, were famous or infamous within political or social contexts; these have survived in historical works dealing with Georgian politics. For the most part, however, intellectual historians of the twentieth century are inclined to treat the Warburtons and the Monboddos as a rather bizarre species, now extinct: the overspecialized freaks thrown out by the current of ideological evolution.

For a very long time Horace Walpole has been viewed by many scholarly critics as a similar sort of oddity. His literary productions were so varied, so numerous, and so uneven in quality that he defied placement in a single area of interest. Walpole's own account of his writings in the Short Notes of his life provokes in the reader wonder at a mind at once interested in making Latin verses on the marriage of the Prince of Wales, parodies of Macbeth with political overtones, Fontainesque fables about little white dogs, catalogues of oil paintings, bagatelle verses, vehement periodical essays and pamphlets, scores of cenotaphs for deceased acquaintances, and Historic Doubts on Richard III.

Every man, according to Bacon, is a debtor to his profession. Although the historian pays his debt by devotion to truth, unless he has thought about truth as well as worshipped it he may — to adapt a figure from Bishop Berkeley — become a thriving earthworm but he will surely make a sorry historian. So vermiculate a metaphor need not prompt every disciple of Clio to compose a penetrating Idea of History, but it may properly incite him to give life to his facts by evoking the universal while documenting the specific, by preferring insights to formulas, and by recalling that historiographical clichés and historical facts — modern saws and ancient instances — go ill together. If the historian of the ancient world benefits from built-in ignorance, the historian of the modern world suffers from built-in knowledge, not merely because of the mountain of fact but because this very mountain permits him to let a tissue of fact do duty for history. Absence of metaphysics is too high a price for erudition.

For some years historians have been revolting against easy generalizations and after-mindedness. Their revolt does not find expression in systems, which carry farthest the very practices exciting revolt, but in analysis of assumptions. The critical historian explores his topic in its own terms, not in terms of later dogmas; he reconstructs ideas and institutions in their own context, not as the shape of things to come; he considers his characters in their own environment, not as ancestors; he replaces anonymous society and impersonal forces with living men and women.

On October 30, 1673 Sir Paul Neile took his seat in the House of Commons. In early August he and Henry Savile had been elected the first members from Newark-on-Trent, newly enfranchised by a royal charter granted the preceding March. But the seating of the two new members proved to be no simple thing. Determined parliamentary opposition not only to the king's grant itself but also to the terms of that grant were to delay the admission of Newark's burgesses for four years and to require a second election before that admission was finally accomplished. The Commons saw in this, Charles II's only attempt to enfranchise a borough by charter, a royal design to dilute and weaken their newly and hard-won power. In the charter's offending clauses, which limited the parliamentary franchise to the Mayor and Aldermen, or Corporation of Newark, they saw a scheme to grant privilege only to those whom the crown could readily control and through whom it might strengthen the court faction in the lower House. The debate was protracted, but intermittent. The Commons knew the force of legal precedent to support the king, but they also recognized what the consequence would be if the Newark attempt were to succeed. For though the argument was legal, the debate was political.

The question itself seems slight, but its implications were not. In the end the king was forced to acknowledge defeat. The increasing momentum of the opposition, and the emergence of more important issues finally indicated that to insist would be impolitic, and the king's faction settled for compromise.