The creation of the National Government of 1931 has been a theme of unending comment and controversy. Politicians and writers of the left, with their party suddenly decapitated and bereft of office, not surprisingly were bitter. Their tendency was to castigate anyone who had played an obvious role in the crisis. Therefore, Ramsay MacDonald, who presided over the change, has been branded a traitor by his former colleagues and by later generations of Labour supporters. Even for historians he has remained at the center of the controversy.

From a slightly wider perspective, it has been possible to suspect a “bankers' ramp,” and the king has been singled out for special abuse on the charge of misleading the prime minister. Although some of these elements have been dismissed as myths in Reginald Bassett's 1958 treatise, the controversy hardly has been brought closer to a solution. In his review of that polemical study, Richard Crossman contended that “no one has yet succeeded in writing about this crisis without violent partisanship” and that it remained “the kind of live political issue about which no one except a political eunuch can write dispassionately.” That the debate continues is evident from the recent biography of MacDonald by David Marquand, who, in an attempt to vindicate his subject, once more reverts to the king as the agent most responsible for the creation of a coalition. Amazingly, no writer has yet interpreted the formation of the National Government as a Conservative Party bid for power, despite the control manifested by that party in the ensuing general election and the eventual successions of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain to the premiership.

With the notable exception of Scotland, Queen Victoria was never very enthusiastic about her kingdoms of the “Celtic fringe.” During the sixty-four years of her reign, Victoria spent a healthy seven years in Scotland, a mere seven weeks in Ireland, and a paltry seven nights in Wales. Although there was little overt hostility, the nonconformist Welsh often felt neglected by the monarch and embittered by the queen's position as the head of the Church of England. Her Irish visits, however, were subject to more open opposition by stalwart republicans. Her visit to Dublin in 1900 was accompanied by embarrassing incidents and coercive measures to ensure the pleasant reception and safety of the monarch.

The reign of King Edward VII was notable for its warmer attitude toward Wales and Ireland, but this transformation in the relationship between the monarchy and the nations of the “Celtic fringe” reached its most clear expression with the 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales during the reign of his son, King George V. The press considered the ceremony to be more important than any other royal visit to the Celtic nations and publicized it widely in the United Kingdom and British Empire. The organizers of the event erected telegraph offices at the site of the ceremony, and the railways established special express trains running from Caernarfon to London that were equipped with darkrooms in order to send stories and photographs of the event directly to the newspapers of Fleet Street.

The scene is familiar to most students of English history. In 664 A.D. the Northumbrian kings Oswiu and his son Alhfrith met with their clergy at Whitby to resolve (in Bede's words) “a great and active controversy about the keeping of Easter.” Oswiu, who presided over the council, listened patiently to a long and often bitter debate between the Irish and Roman advocates. On the surface, it was an unequal contest, for the traditions of Iona were upheld by the king's own bishop, Colman, while those of Rome were championed by a young abbot, Wilfrid, a protege of Alhfrith. But once again David slew Goliath. Oswiu, fearing for the welfare of his soul, pronounced in favor of the Apostle Peter, the “hostiarius … qui claues tenere probatur,” thus turning his back on his own childhood teachings. “When the king had spoken, all who were seated there or standing by, both high and low, gave up their imperfect rules, and readily accepted in their place those which they recognized to be better.”

Bede portrayed the Council of Whitby as the decisive confrontation in his native Northumbria between the rival ecclesiastical traditions of Rome and Iona. For him, the Roman triumph, the climax of the third book of his Ecclesiastical History, signified that the Northumbrian church would no longer be guided by “a handful of people in the remotest of islands,” but would rejoin the “catholic and apostolic" Church of Christ. Oswiu's dramatic conversion at Whitby was thus a crucial step in the growth of Christian unity in the British Isles.

Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically in The Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.

Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. In Becoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”

The early Stuart period witnessed a startling transformation in the physical environment of the royal court. At James I's accession, Whitehall and the great courtier's palaces along the Strand still lay in an essentially rural landscape. To the south, Westminster was a compact town of perhaps 6,500 people, while to the north and east, the three Strand parishes of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, St. Mary le Savoy, and St. Clement Danes contained another 6,000, mostly concentrated in a narrow ribbon along the Strand itself. North of the Strand, the landscape remained open except for a thinner ribbon along High Holborn. Covent Garden was a pasture and orchard, containing a number of fine timber trees, St. Martin's church was still literally “in the fields“ and Lincoln's Inn Fields comprised over forty acres of open land. Dairying and market gardening were going concerns over much of what soon became the West End. Only a few years before, St. Martin's parish had experienced an enclosure riot.

On the eve of the Civil War, a continuous urban landscape extended from Temple Bar as far as Soho, and ribbons of development spread along both sides of St. James's Park, as far as Knightsbridge and Picadilly. The population of old Westminster had increased by about 250 percent, while the Strand area grew even more rapidly, with St. Martin's-in-the-Fields experiencing more than a fivefold increase to as many as 17,000 people. Had they been independent settlements, all three of the large West End parishes of St. Margaret's Westminster, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and St. Clement Danes would have ranked among the half dozen largest English provincial cities. In all, the western suburbs' population probably stood between 40,000 and 60,000.

Wilkie Collins's Victorian novel The Woman in White contains a scene in which the hero unknowingly aids the woman of the title, Anne Catherick, to escape from an asylum. When he learns that she was an escaped patient, he reflects on his action: “what had I done? Assisted the victim of the most horrible of all false imprisonments to escape; or cast loose on the wide world of London an unfortunate creature, whose actions it was my duty, and every man's duty, mercifully to control?” The question was one which, less directly, confronted Victorian society as a whole. The nineteenth century saw the rapid expansion of an asylum system designed “mercifully to control” the insane, a development of which many Englishmen felt proud. Yet this pride was often accompanied by an endemic, nagging fear that persons were being improperly confined in asylums. Occasionally, the exposure of some apparently egregious case of wrongful confinement raised these fears to epidemic proportions and produced what the Victorians called “lunacy panics.” These outbursts of public rage symptomized the tensions within a society determined to ban the mad from its midst, yet uncertain of the boundaries of madness, skeptical of the abilities of those it had chosen to draw those boundaries, and undecided as to the actual purposes of confinement. Indeed, the Victorians never clearly established what they meant by “wrongful” confinement. At times they seemed to mean the confinement of the sane; at other times they seemed to include those who were insane but not manifestly dangerous.

The demonstration in the House of Commons on March 2, 1629, by Sir John Eliot, John Selden, and several other members was an event with the most serious implications. Their protest against the Arminian movement in the English church and against the levying of Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament was in fact an appeal to the country over the head of the king's government. One is inclined to agree with Conrad Russell that this act was potentially revolutionary. Its immediate consequence was a stoppage of trade and a widespread refusal to pay customs duties, at a time of desperate royal financial need. On March 3, Eliot, Selden, and seven other members of the Commons were summoned to appear before the Privy Council, where they were later interrogated as to the meaning of their words and actions. When questioned, most of them appealed to parliamentary privilege, four (including Eliot) refusing absolutely to answer any question concerning matters in the House. Two of the delinquents, Coryton and Hayman, submitted themselves to the king and were released. The remaining seven were detained. The prosecution of these men by the Caroline regime was an important political episode too lengthy to be dealt with here in its entirety. But one aspect of these proceedings is worthy of examination in its own right. The hearings in King's Bench on the return of the prisoners' writs of habeas corpus have not received the attention and the analysis they deserve.