Historians such as Conrad Russell and Kevin Sharpe have recently stressed the “British” nature of the crisis which toppled Charles I's regime in the 1640s. England, these historians remind us, was not the first of Charles's three kingdoms to rebel but the last; the Scots rose in 1639–40, the Irish rose in the fall of 1641, but the English only belatedly followed suit in August 1642. They have thus suggested that the origins of the English Civil War cannot be explained within a purely English context but must be understood within the larger vortex of multinational British politics.

This injection of the “British problem” into the historiographical debate may seem like a neutral intervention, but in practice it has been closely associated with the revisionist interpretation of the seventeenth century. Since the 1970s, revisionist historians have contended that early Stuart England was an ideologically stable society which collapsed only after a series of sudden, contingent events disrupted the existing consensus. They have thus been at pains to find short-term, nonideological explanations for the Civil War's outbreak or else face embarrassing charges that they have proven why there was no civil war in seventeenth-century England. The “British problem” has come into the debate as just such an explanation, as an answer to thorny questions about how such a violent storm as the English Civil War could have arisen out of clear skies. After all, if radicalized Scotsmen spread the language of confessional conflict and resistance theory across the border, as Sharpe has argued, then no internal explanation for the English Civil War is required.

In the mélange of conflicting theories on the origins of the English Civil War, a number of English social groups have received scrupulous attention. Storms have brewed over the gentry, the aristocracy, and more recently, “the middle sort of people” in town and countryside. Even the rural peasantry, traditionally neglected by historians, have not been overlooked in the most recent debates. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the English professional classes although studies of the clerical and legal professions have been forthcoming of late. Perhaps worst served of all in the ongoing war of scholars has been the English medical profession. The recent historiography on English physicians and their relationship to the Civil War can be briefly summarized.

The little work that has been done on professional physicians revolves almost exclusively around the fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London. In 1964, in a distinguished history of the college, Sir George Clark suggested that the fellowship probably leaned to the royalist cause, but out of political expediency accommodated itself to the reality of parliament's power in the City of London. Referring to the events of 1642 and 1643, Clark wrote:

The triennium 1536–38 marks the crisis of Henry VIII's reign. The palace coup that toppled Anne Boleyn in May and June 1536 and apparently left Thomas Cromwell more firmly in control instead ushered in a series of further threats to both Cromwell and Henry. The upheaval of the Pilgrimage of Grace convulsed the north in late 1536 and early 1537 and looked for a time as if it would shake Henry's throne. The Pilgrims' calls for the upstart Cromwell's removal forced the chief minister to withdraw behind the scenes for a time, always a tricky maneuver. The battle of wits and wills between the king and his cousin and sometime protégé Reginald Pole runs as counterpoint throughout these dislocations. Pole's intemperate attack on Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, De unitate, arrived at the extremely sensitive moment of June 1536 and announced the beginning of an eighteen-month struggle that finally led to an irreparable breach between Henry and Pole. De unitate has often been taken to signal Pole's crossing of the Rubicon. It should certainly have discomfited Pole's potential allies just as many of his partisans thought they had jockeyed themselves into power by engineering Anne's downfall. In fact, the work had a minimal effect, mainly because the committee entrusted with reading it was heavily stacked with Pole's friends. Henry probably never saw De unitate. Despite its violent language, neither Pole nor his supporters were then quite ready to give up on Henry. Early the next year the situation changed. Paul III created the new cardinal Pole a legate and dispatched him to Flanders, traditional locus of plots against England.

I

Did men and women have different cultural and material values in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? We know very little in detail about the activities of people within their homes and especially about their attitudes to the material goods that they used and that surrounded them. Virginia Woolf's complaint that she had no model to “turn about this way and that” in exploring the role of women in fiction applies equally to women's behavior as consumers, for we still do not know, as she put it, “what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night.” Did their particular roles within the household result in different material values, just as their biological and economic roles were different? We do know that power was unequally distributed within the household, although we can also demonstrate cooperation and affection between family members. We take it that the household was, in some sense, the woman's domain, but very often we cannot explore what this meant in practice. In short, was being “subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men” reflected in women's cultural values and tastes?

These are broad questions that are not easily answered, either in theory or by observation, especially as it is not easy to identify the behavior of women as distinct from that of the family and household, but they are questions worth asking to see if there are signs of behavior different enough to warrant the view that there was a subculture in which women had the chance to express themselves and their views of the world separately, especially as the daily routines of their lives were different.

“I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.” With these words, Dr. William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated precisely the crime he denied to the last. Palmer's twelveday trial in May 1856, among the most celebrated English murder cases of the century, had received massive press attention, and his execution was no less scrutinized. Scaffold speeches being traditional opportunities for achieving closure on a case (preferably, though not exclusively, by confession and repentance), press reports devoted a good deal of space to the concerted efforts made to convince Palmer to comply with these expectations: “From the time of his sentence to the very moment when he ascended the scaffold,” one correspondent observed, “Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.”

Interrogated to the last, Palmer offered instead of closure a riddle, neither directly denying his guilt nor ratifying the grounds upon which his conviction rested. In doing so he seemed to take aim at the most contentious part of the trial, namely, the scientific evidence that had attributed the death of John Parsons Cook to strychnine poisoning. By disavowing strychnine as the agent of Cook's death, he at once repudiated the prosecution's fundamental contention and left open the possibility that, although he had been justly condemned as a murderer, his conviction was based on fallacious medico-legal grounds.

Palmer's dying words became the subject of widespread concern.

The narrative stories of nineteenth-century British history have been pulled seriously out of joint. At one time, not too long ago, the master narrative of nineteenth-century history seemed fairly straightforward. The nineteenth century raised the curtain on the modern age; its politics, economics, social relations, and culture presaged the world we know from our own times. If there was one organizing principle that the historiography privileged above all others, it was the idea of change. This was the century of growth and change—generally of a progressive kind. But new stories are now being told that force us to reconsider this picture. The spotlight is being directed toward themes of continuity that challenge the representation of the nineteenth century as the moment of modernity. It is this shift from change to continuity as the basic organizing principle of the field that is the starting point for this article.

The touch of continuity is everywhere. The traditional historiography rested secure in the conception that the nineteenth century was shaped and dominated by the fact of Britain as the first industrial nation. But current research has dissolved the Industrial Revolution into the long-term trends of economic growth; now the very name itself is jeopardized. Whereas the nineteenth century was once regarded as the age of the bourgeoisie, it is the landed elites and their various allies who now occupy center stage. The urban middle class has been returned to the provincial peripheries.

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnson's single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnson's style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridge's comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put.

Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnson's political thinking was not always appreciated by England's political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnson's political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnson's fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century.

Johnson's career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.