Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.

The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.

This article examines Jane Cobden's campaign for the London County Council (L.C.C.) in 1888–89 and its controversial aftermath. Cobden's effort, a pioneering political venture of British feminism, illuminates late-Victorian concepts of gender. It provides at once an anticipation of, and a distinct contrast to, the militant suffragism of the Edwardian era. In addition, it suggests new ways of thinking about the connection between women's-suffragist and labor politics. Perhaps because the campaign was a comparatively obscure incident when measured against the broad sweep of British political history, however, no scholar has done much more than sketch its bare outline. Hopefully, the fuller depiction provided below will accord it the treatment it really deserves.

This article approaches the subject from a tangent, however. Cobden's campaign was a significant if little-known episode not only in the history of British suffragism but also in the life of a man who went on to play a major role in British politics long after the first county council elections had been forgotten. This was George Lansbury, Cobden's political agent during 1888–89 and secretary of the Bow and Bromley Radical and Liberal Federation. Lansbury eventually became one of the main architects of the socialist movement in East London and a chief male supporter of the militant suffragettes during the Edwardian era (in 1912 he temporarily lost his seat in the House of Commons and went to prison on their behalf). He also became a founder and editor of the quintessential “rebel” newspaper, the Daily Herald (which was designated Labour's official organ after Lansbury left it in 1922), a pacifist opponent of World War I, and, from 1931 to 1935, leader of the Labour party itself.

Despite the very considerable scholarly attention focused on Thomas Cromwell in recent decades, surprisingly little is known or written about his private financial affairs and, in particular, about the acquisition and management of his landed estates. His principal but badly outdated biographer, R. B. Merriman, was content with a few sweeping generalizations about immense ill-gotten wealth; the only modern biography devotes to this topic barely two paragraphs; and G. R. Elton, who began and sustains the Cromwellian renaissance, is concerned primarily with the public man.

Yet at the time of his arrest in 1540, Cromwell was one of the biggest landowners in the southeastern home counties, the end result of an active decade of buying and selling lands, augmented by large monastic and other royal grants. With Cromwell's creation as earl of Essex, his appointment as lord great chamberlain, and his son Gregory's marriage into the Seymour family (becoming thereby uncle to the future Edward VI), the uninitiated might well be pardoned for seeing here the origin of still one more powerful landed political dynasty which, like the Seymours themselves, the Russells, the Paulets, and the Cecils, owed its beginning to political skill and the opportunities of a fluid sixteenth-century land market.

Certainly this new style of service aristocracy, founded first on office in the central government and concentrating on London and the court, with landed wealth frequently coming later as a reward rather than first as a birthright, was perfectly consistent with the major realignment of relations between king and nobility which characterized the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs and their leading ministers.

Irish historian A. T. Q. Stewart has aptly described the world inhabited by eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as one of “hidden” significance. Compared to the rise of the Ascendancy and the repression of Catholics under the penal code, the story of Ulster's Presbyterians figures as interesting, albeit less significant, marginalia. While a few studies detail the handicaps the group suffered in the years after the Williamite Settlement, their eighteenth-century experience has mainly attracted church historians interested in theological disputes, social historians charting the rise of the linen industry, and students of the '98 Rebellion exploring the ways in which a latent Presbyterian radicalism contributed to the formation of the United Irish movement. Explaining who the Ulster Scots were or how they defined themselves has not attracted much scholarly attention, an unsurprising failure given that historians have designated the eighteenth century in Ireland as the period of “penal era and golden age.”

This article argues that a new, more fully integrated approach to the study of Ireland and Britain offers possibilities for recovering the history of the Ulster Scots. Nearly twenty-five years after J. G. A. Pocock issued his “plea” for a “new British history” that would incorporate the experiences of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within a single narrative by exploring the ways in which each “interacted so as to modify the condition of one another's existence,” scholars have finally responded. The new British history, with its focus on the development of a British state system, seeks to explore, according to a chief proponent, John Morrill, the ways in which “the political and constitutional relationship between the communities of the two islands were transformed” and the processes through which they gained “a new sense of their own identities as national communities.”