During the century that has elapsed since Gladstone's famous Midlothian Campaigns of 1879–80, the British political parties have had to adjust to a series of major changes and developments in both the structure and the substance of politics: the extension of the parliamentary vote to all men and women over the age of eighteen; the move toward the direct taxation of incomes; the rise of a “welfare state”; the steady, if unspectacular, decline of British industry; two debilitating world wars; the retreat from empire; and the loss of major-power status. At first sight every one of these changes represents a problem for British Conservatives: they appear to have been perpetually working against the grain of history. Yet in the general election of 1885 the Conservatives achieved a 43.5 percent share of the popular vote, while in the election of June 1987 they won just 43 percent. Far from being pushed to the margins by more adaptable or more popular parties, they appear to be as strong and as central in the British political system as they ever were.

Of course, Conservative support has not been quite as stable as a comparison between 1885 and 1987 suggests. Their vote has indeed fluctuated, though within a fairly narrow range; the minimum is usually 38 percent to 39 percent, and the maximum around 48 percent (table 1).

Historians have begun to rediscover the Puritan Revolution. A number of recent studies concentrating on the Long Parliament, on particular counties, or on clusters of religious ideas have found religious divisions at the heart of the collapse of early Stuart government. This article tries to consolidate this trend by looking at the behavior of one prominent individual. If it was indeed religious conviction that drove active minorities to take up arms, then it is essential to find men who have left enough evidence of a sufficiently intimate kind to permit us to pry into the feelings and longings that determined their particular responses to the developing crisis in church and state. While it is hoped that such a case study can help to clarify general issues, it is obviously not possible to claim that one case study demonstrates any particular theory of allegiance. This article presents an instance of a general theory and no more.

The subject of the first part of this article is Sir William Brereton (1604–61) of Handforth in Cheshire, who will be examined as a Puritan magistrate in the 1630s, as a Parliamentarian activist in the early 1640s, as a county boss in the war years, and as an increasingly disillusioned “honest radical” from 1646 and especially from 1653. He is probably better documented in the public records than all but twenty or so M.P.s in the Long Parliament, and his fifteen hundred extant letters plus a collection of private papers and travel journals from the 1630s make him probably the best documented of all county bosses, at least down to 1646.

We are in the midst of a remarkable moment of historical change, in which the very meaning of “Europe” — as economic region, political entity, cultural construct, object of study—is being called dramatically into question, and with it the meanings of the national cultures that provide its parts. While perceptions have been overwhelmed by the political transformations in the east since the autumn of 1989, profound changes have also been afoot in the west, with the legislation aimed at producing a single European market in 1992. Moreover, these dramatic events — the democratic revolutions against Stalinism in Eastern Europe, the expansion and strengthening of the European Community (EC) — have presupposed a larger context of accumulating change. The breakthrough to reform under Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Solidarity crisis in Poland, and the stealthful reorientations in Hungary have been matched by longer-run processes of change in Western Europe, resulting from the crisis of social democracy in its postwar Keynesian welfare-statist forms, capitalist restructuring, and the general trend toward transnational Western European economic integration.

Taken as a whole, these developments in east and west make the years 1989-92 one of those few times when fundamental political and constitutional changes, in complex articulation with social and economic transformations, are occurring on a genuinely European-wide scale, making this one of the several great constitution-making periods of modern European history.

The victory of the Labour party in the British general election of July 1945 was preeminently a triumph of Left over Right. Labour won 393 seats, while the Conservatives, despite the prestige associated with their wartime leader Winston Churchill, won only 213. As the election results came in over the radio on July 26, the veteran Labour M.P. James Chuter Ede “began to wonder if I should wake up to find it all a dream.” By the end of the day, he was moved to record that the outcome of the election was “as great as 1906 … one of the unique occasions in British history—a Red Letter day in the best sense of that word.” At the same time, however, the election was of crucial importance in the development of the Left itself, especially with regard to the relationship between the Labour party and the Left as a whole.

I Labour's decisive election victory has commonly been interpreted as the climax of a long and gradual rise to power. The historian Charles Mowat was quick to point out that its success was “the culmination of a political movement now more than sixty years old.” The historic mission of the Labour party, its “fifty years' march” from tiny pressure group to majority government, was the subject of several Whiggish treatises in the following few years. Over the last decade, moreover, the increasing recent difficulties of the Labour party have tended to highlight the comparative steadiness of its earlier growth, although they have also stimulated greater attention to the early causes of later conflicts.

For over two generations, scholars have studied Sir Edward Grey's response to the Sarajevo crisis, apparently considering every aspect of his dual effort to find a diplomatic solution while convincing the cabinet that England must intervene in a general war. Historians have generally agreed that Grey's last hope to prevent war evaporated by the end of July, although the cabinet did not decide to intervene until August 2. In this light, the events of August 1, 1914, are only considered to be either a prelude or a postscript to more significant events. The purpose of this essay is to suggest that Grey pursued two distinct, yet interrelated, courses of action on August 1, 1914: (1) for as long as he was unsure of cabinet support for intervention, he sought to make a diplomatic deal with the German ambassador so that a neutral England could salvage something from the crisis, but (2) once confident England would enter the conflict, he sought to prevent the war altogether by applying diplomatic pressure on France.

Historians have overlooked Grey's diplomacy on August 1 primarily because of the cloud cast over the events of the day by the so-called misunderstanding between Grey and the German ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky. The first Grey-Lichnowsky exchange took place that morning when Sir William Tyrrell, Grey's private secretary, brought a message to the German embassy. After subsequently receiving a personal call from Grey, Lichnowsky, at 11:14 a.m., sent a wire to Berlin in which he indicated Grey had proposed that, if Germany “were not to attack France, England would remain neutral and would guarantee France's passivity.”

In recent years the investigation of urban political culture prior to the Civil War has benefited greatly from three historiographical initiatives, all of them suggesting in one way or another the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. Though it deals with a later period, the work of Peter Borsay and others on what he has labeled “The English Urban Renaissance” has fleshed out a wide variety of cultural forms, verbal and nonverbal, and documented their development in the urban milieu. These studies have implicitly raised the question of antecedents from the pre-Civil War period and have suggested some possible lines of development. Yet by viewing urban culture as largely developing out of the cultural and social demands of the landed classes, rather than from concerns which were indigenously urban, and by not specifically connecting culture with politics to begin with, this work remains limited in its influence on the investigation of the earlier period.

A second tradition has emphasized the importance of Protestant, and especially Puritan, ideology in urban political culture before the Civil War. Such scholars as Paul Seaver, Patrick Collinson, and David Underdown have illuminated the force of those religious and moral concerns on the governing process and have explored such cultural forms as the sermon and the lecture as part of this effort. Their approach has been more explicitly political, and—even if the objective is often to assess the role of Puritan ideology in English politics leading up to the Civil War—it has still told us a great deal about the politics and culture of towns themselves in this period.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.

Debates about poverty in mid-seventeenth-century England have, for some years, been a staple of historical studies. In our own time, where the numbers of the dispossessed continue to challenge the success of current modes of social and economic organization, such an interest is understandable and to be welcomed. But the relevance of studies of past problems and solutions and their applicability to present purposes is more complex than is usually recognized.

The immediate benefit of studying discussions for change in mid-seventeenth-century England is that they provide an unusual insight into how members of that society conceived of it. In particular, their observations about the problems of poverty and the role of the poor offer us an understanding of the perceived social structure, the ethical bases for social differentiation, and the degree to which the future could be envisioned as differing from the past or present. Such understandings of proposed social change are invaluable for historians wishing to grasp the underlying assumptions on which past thought and action was predicated.

Past proposals for social reform, however, have also been the focus of a significantly different enquiry by historians. In order to render those past programs more comprehensible (and more directly “relevant”) to modern readers, they are often placed on a “conservative” versus “radical” continuum, one end of which has sometimes been marked “extreme left wing.” This article argues that any such classification inevitably leads to misunderstandings of the authors and of their programs and, consequently, misrepresents both to the present.

The origins of the Civil War are apparent from the outset of the History of the Rebellion: “he who shall diligently observe the distempers and conjunctures of the time,” Clarendon contends, “will find all this bulk of misery to have proceeded, and to have been brought upon us, from the same natural causes and means which have usually attended kingdoms swoln with long plenty, pride, and excess, towards some signal mortification, and castigation of Heaven.” The relationship between prosperity and calamity is, of course, commonplace in classical as well as seventeenth-century chronicles of civil conflict, but both the sections of the History written in 1646 and those added some twenty years later insist that “the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation” (I, 84). Although he modifies his praise of this peaceful era in The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon, claiming that “England enjoyed the greatest Measure of Felicity that it [and not, as he earlier said, any nation] had ever known,” this view of Caroline prosperity remains extreme. Clarendon likens the years of Charles's personal rule to a golden age. Without specifically invoking the classical tradition of the halcyon calm or the return of Astraea, his recollection of the 1630s gives central importance and new immediacy to a well-established Caroline myth of peace.

Modern historians have generally found much amiss in the decade of Charles's personal rule, and they have naturally questioned Clarendon's characterization of unrivalled happiness. Only B. H. G. Wormald's seminal study of Clarendon accepts the notion of “unparalleled prosperity,” which, it argues, “is an indisputable fact so far at least as the gentry were concerned.”

When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiles's interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content.

By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiles's own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the women's movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for women's rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.