In 1835 the English Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst introduced into the House of Lords a bill to correct an ambiguity in the law concerning marriages within prohibited degrees. The existing law, based on the 1533 Henrican statute fixing the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, specified that marriages within prohibited degrees could be annulled at any time within the lifetime of both spouses by the Ecclesiastical Court. Lord Lyndhurst argued that the uncertain status of such “voidable marriages” created an inconvenience and hardship for the married persons and especially for their children, who could during their parents' lifetime be declared illegitimate. His specific motive was to guarantee the legitimacy and inheritance of the son of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had married his deceased wife's half-sister, a relationship within the prohibited degrees. Lyndhurst proposed that parliament pass a bill to limit to two years the time within which marriages could be annulled.

The consensus in parliament was that the ambiguity of “voidable marriages” should be eliminated, and they readily passed a revised form of Lord Lyndhurst's bill, declaring that all marriages within the prohibited degrees of affinity contracted before August 31, 1835 were immediately and absolutely valid. Yet, even as they eased restrictions on existing marriages, they tightened the law for the future by adding a clause which made marriages of both affinity and consanguinity contracted after that date absolutely void.

In the parliamentary debate on the bill, there was some opposition from those who argued that marriages within certain degrees of affinity, in particular a man and his deceased wife's sister, should be permitted.

Assessments of the famous “Peace Ballot,” officially “A National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments,” have undergone little change since its results were announced in June 1935. Like contemporary observers, historians are unclear on the origins of the ballot, are impressed by the public response, and are uncertain of the meaning of “the most remarkable popular referendum ever initiated and carried through by private enterprise.” Historians will probably never reach a consensus on the exact meaning of the ballot and are likely to go on echoing the diverse judgments of contemporaries. But the origins of the referendum are not obscure, and in The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940 Maurice Cowling has offered a stimulating thesis that could embrace the ballot and suggest a new evaluation of the political controversy that surrounded the preparation and conduct of that much-heralded “National Declaration.”

Cowling has persuasively argued that foreign policy was the form party conflict took in Great Britain in the late 1930s. Politicians conducted it in the light of party considerations. Cowling selected 1935 as the year foreign policy first became “central,” when Abyssinia became the focus of all political discussions. And it was the issue through which Stanley Baldwin reestablished Conservative “centrality” in domestic politics after strong “swings” against the government in by-elections during 1933 and 1934.

According to the Cowling thesis, in the class-polarized politics of the 1930s, party leaders had to be especially sensitive to the opinion of the center, which, in 1935, meant presenting policy in terms that the League of Nations Union and its largely Liberal constituency would approve.

It is a commonplace of Tudor history that one distinctive feature of the reign of Elizabeth Tudor was the panache with which she wooed her English subjects. Such activity has been treated much more as an aspect of her “instinct for romantic leadership,” much less as a subject for serious historical study. This article sets out to redress that dismissive stance and argues that the language and processes of her “wooing” encapsulated an intersection of humanist beliefs and Tudor policy, with serious political purposes and significant political implications. Since the 1960s, a new orthodoxy in the study of political thought has stressed the importance of paying attention to the audiences for whom, and the contexts within which, particular political ideas were expressed, but there has been little effect of this trend on Tudor political studies. Historians have paid only passing attention to whole new genres of Tudor political discourse, let alone to the increasing Tudor range of strategies for presenting fundamental political propositions to an ever-widening audience. The introduction of print, the polemical function of Tudor homilies, Tudor royal proclamations, and court-sponsored political pamphlets all carried important messages. Such evolving forms contained within them implied redefinitions of relationships between subject and monarch. The reign of Henry VIII reflected the evolution of a qualitatively new concept of the sovereign monarch, drawing on an increasingly unqualified doctrine of allegiance.

The most persistent difficulty confronting historical interpreters of popular religion in the early modern world is that of establishing the relationship between ideas enunciated by religious leaders and those held by their hearers. The causes of that uncertainty are obvious; where historical materials for the former are plentiful, sources that address the latter are far more difficult to obtain. The great majority of evidence that we have concerning lay religiosity derives from clerical rather than lay sources, and most of it tells us more about religious behavior than belief. Even those rare accounts we have that purport to narrate the spiritual experiences of ordinary people tend to be both unrepresentative and stylized, to the point where the ultimate implications of such materials for understanding popular belief often are far from certain.

Problems of documentation lead to equally significant but less often noted distortions in perspective. Where they have lacked adequate source materials for recovering the mental world of the laity, historians almost by necessity have had to approach their task as one of ascertaining the portion and proportion of the expressions of the ministry that lay men and women adopted. Thus deviations from clerical orthodoxy can only be understood as indicative either of a lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of the laity, or, at best, of a latent “folk” worldview that remains almost inaccessible to historical description. Yet there is ample documentation in the historical record that the laity possessed a rather remarkable capacity to integrate seemingly disparate beliefs and actively forge their own understandings of the delivered message and create their own religious symbols.

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.

It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.

It is now over twenty years since Geoffrey Crossick first urged historians to investigate the English lower middle class. On that occasion he suggested that small business interests and white-collar employees be designated the two wings of a residual lower middle class. Historians speculated that the members of this class were bound together by their marginality to the social, cultural, and economic world of the middle class and by their pathetic attempts to ape the gentility of their superiors. Such an analysis confirmed the unheroic nature of the lower-middle-class mentalité and explains Crossick's conclusion that this group “claimed no vital social role.” Crossick's more recent work, in collaboration with Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, offers a reevaluation of this earlier position and concludes that white-collar and small business interests should not be considered to occupy the same social station. Crossick and Haupt's work is significant because both authors make it clear that they now credit the petite bourgeoisie of small business families in Europe with a greater spirit of independence than they had earlier acknowledged. They argue convincingly that the petite bourgeoisie created their own social and cultural world, centered on the interrelationship between enterprise and family life, which enabled them to react more purposefully to outside social forces and agencies.

By hiving off these small business interests from the old lower middle class, we are left with a rump of white-collar workers who collectively formed a lower middle class that shared many common experiences and hence is attractive to historians as a potentially more cohesive social body.

Few incidents in the reign of Henry III excited more interest and amazement than the fall of Hubert de Burgh. Between 1215 and 1232, Hubert held the office of chief justiciar. After 1219 he progressively dominated the government of England. “He lacked nothing of royal power,” commented the Waverley annalist, “save the dignity of a royal diadem.” Then suddenly in 1232 “the great judge” was swept from court and stripped of all his lands and offices. He became a hunted fugitive. He was dragged from a chapel in which he had taken sanctuary, and incarcerated in chains in Devizes castle. Historians have been attracted by the drama of these events, but they have never provided a coherent explanation of Hubert's dismissal. The accounts of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris are confused. Those of Sir Maurice Powicke, though illuminating, are discursive and inaccurate.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the fall of England's last great justiciar. It is hoped to show that Powicke exaggerated the extent to which the justiciar's demise was consciously planned by the king, and that he underestimated the force of Hubert's struggle to stay in office. Powicke also failed to stress the connection between the justiciar's fall and events in the early years of the minority. Although Henry III came fully of age in 1227, the politics of the period 1217-34 must be viewed as a whole. Conflicts that burgeoned between 1217 and 1224, and were in some respects the legacy of the reign of John, cast a malign shadow over the next decade.

In the decade after 1807, the Whig Opposition was divided between the conservatives and the progressives, the former consisting of the Grenvillites and most Foxite-Whigs, particularly their leaders, while many of the latter associated together in the Mountain. This was led by Samuel Whitbread until his death in 1815. It was distinguished from the rest of the Opposition primarily by its independent, aggressively activist support for economical and parliamentary reform and its willingness to associate on these issues with the followers of Sir Francis Burdett and the metropolitan radicals. The Opposition as a whole, and more recently the Grenvillites, have been carefully examined as part of the ongoing study of political groups in this era, but as yet there is no systematic analysis of the Mountain. This paper identifies twenty-one Mountaineers and marshalls the evidence for the nature of their activities together. It also analyzes the sources and nature of their reformist ideology, their independence, their tactics as a pressure group and their relationship to the Whigs and the radicals.

I

Twelve Mountaineers were by birth aristocrats and gentry. The Mountain's independent character was in part shaped by country gentlemen like Thomas William Coke and Charles Callis Western. Although committed to Whiggism and the Whig party, such men also inherited in some respects the eighteenth-century country party mentality which believed that the executive was corrupt and prided itself on acting independently as a check upon its excesses. Young Lord Folkestone, even more independent, was committed to Whiggism but not at all to the Whig party for he thought of himself as an independent, virtuous aristocrat guarding against and exposing government corruption.