This talk represents a crisis of principle. I have long held that a presidential address to a learned society should not belabor that society with laments or summonses, nor should it ask whither the discipline; rather, it should be a serious scholarly or interpretive effort. But it is an equally compelling principle with me that an after-dinner talk should suit the mood of relaxed good feeling that is likely to characterize the occasion. To answer both requirements is no easy task. In defining a genre new to the North American Conference on British Studies, my two predecessors have admirably fulfilled my criteria, combining the serious scholarship one would expect from their distinguished careers with the precise lightness of touch called for on such an occasion.

I will not, I fear, follow their example in either respect. The grand, refractory subject I have chosen has interested me for many years, but I have not earlier addressed it in either research or writing: it has been rather like the unheard theme that Elgar said was present in his Enigma Variations. In now making the theme explicit, as Elgar wisely never did, I shall begin by calling attention to some concerns and perceptions among the English Unitarians over a hundred years, concerns and perceptions that I think reflect a crisis of authority. I shall then suggest ways in which that same analysis might be applied to larger, more important and familiar, segments of nineteenth-century intellectual life.

The navy occupied a significant position in the 1553 succession crisis. However, assessments of its role hitherto have been hampered by conflicting contemporary observations and a paucity of information. Not all issues of consequence can be resolved, but important fresh evidence, particularly, extensive High Court of the Admiralty documentation for one of the royal ships dispatched by the Duke of Northumberland to the East Anglian coast following Edward VI's death, permits a reappraisal of the episode and its significance for the events of that year. The evidence confirms that the Northumberland regime experienced difficulty from the outset in its attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and it suggests that the regime's perceived strengths—in this instance the mid-Tudor navy—were all too frequently illusory.

Francis Bacon wrote his The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh during 1621 after his fall from power and during his initial period of disgrace. He had, of course, contemplated some such history for a long time; and his exile from the Jacobean court allowed him time to complete this project. Exactly how much “research” he did remains a matter of debate. But this history of Henry VII exists as an exceptional example of Tudor-Stuart historical writing. Given Bacon's fascination with questions of history, broached in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and expanded in De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), one might reasonably expect to find an example of Bacon's practice of history. The History of Henry VII exists as Bacon's only finished full-scale history of an era, although other fragments survive.

A favorite scholarly pastime, at least since the late nineteenth century, has been to detect Bacon's “errors” in his history—that is, how and where he got things wrong. Sometimes, for example, he apparently duplicated the error of a source. He does not, however, stand alone among historians on this score. In any event, modern historical research affords a clearer view of the accuracy of Bacon's account. None of this detracts, however, from Bacon's considerable achievement. Part of the recognition of his accomplishment derives from understanding the different influences that impinge on Bacon's writing Henry VII. I intend, for example, to assess the indebtedness to the life of the Jacobean court as a model or influence on Bacon's portrait of King Henry's relationship with his wife Queen Elizabeth.

Although he was one of the most eminent philosophers of the early fourteenth century, Walter Burley has seldom attracted much attention for his contributions to political theory. To some extent, this neglect may be blamed on the unfortunate history of the dissemination of Burley's major political work, the Commentarius in VIII Libros Politicorum Aristotelis (composed between 1338 and 1343). While widely circulated during the later Middle Ages, a fact indicated by the large number of extant manuscripts, the Commentarius did not follow Burley's other commentaries on Aristotle's writings into print during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. To my knowledge, no satisfactory explanation has ever been adduced for this lacuna, but it has not been rectified to the present day; a printed edition of the Commentarius, based either on a single manuscript or a critical examination of all the manuscripts, has yet to appear. This absence of a printed version of the text is especially inexplicable in view of the rarity of commentaries on the Politics prior to the end of the fourteenth century.

The use of anthropological methods and models to inform the conceptualization of social history is no longer a novelty by any means. Whereas the historian has long documented and interpreted the events and sometimes the material objects of past times, and placed them in causal relationships, in recent years anthropologists have helped historians to unveil the multiplicity of meaning in a particular sets of events or material objects. Common and effective applications of such collaboration have been made with regard to such concerns as kinship and marriage, the nature of personal honor, hospitality, and the ritualized expression of group identity. Yet historians have also employed an anthropological approach to the ritualistic or semiotic aspects of whole communities.

On the morning of 8 February 1587 (n.s.) Mary Stuart was executed at Fotheringay Castle in Northampton for her complicity in the Babington Plot—the last of the great conspiracies to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I and to place her distant cousin Mary on the English throne in order to re-establish England as a Catholic state. Particularly because of remarks Queen Elizabeth allegedly made to William Davison, to whom the execution warrant was entrusted, nearly every modern historian who has written about the trial and death of Mary Stuart has speculated about the possibility that Queen Elizabeth, particularly in the days immediately preceding Mary's beheading, considered assassination of her cousin as a politic alternative to the axe. Although Elizabeth's chief councillor, Lord Burghley, wished to proceed with what (at least publicly) he regarded as a legal activity, it has not been at all points clear how he was able to persuade the queen to take the steps necessary to accomplish the execution; because Mary was her relative, because she was female, because the doctrine of Divine Right of Kings (to which Elizabeth frequently resorted as proof of her own authority) specified that monarchs were subject to God's judgment alone (and not civil law), and finally, because of the foreign policy implications of executing a woman who was French, Queen of Scotland, near heir to the English throne, and a devout Catholic, Elizabeth hesitated to proceed.

Conrad Russell has recently asked, not for the first time, how far the divided allegiances of members of the Long Parliament were anticipated in the parliaments of the 1620s. Many who sat as M.P.s in the third decade of the seventeenth century had died by the early 1640s, while not all those who still survived were either sufficiently vocal before 1629 or politically active after 1641 to be classifiable for the purposes of this exercise. Nevertheless, Professor Russell manages to assemble a small bloc of members whose earlier politico-religious sympathies and civil war alignments are both more or less known. This group of twenty-six men splits neatly 50:50 between Royalists and Parliamentarians. According to Russell, all that distinguished one from the other in the 1620s, and the sole effective predictor of their later allegiances, was religion. More specifically, the crucial variable turns out to be commitment to further godly reformation, strong in the case of future Parliamentarians, weak in the case of future Royalists. But for Russell's explicit rejection of any “supposed correlation between ‘Puritanism and Revolution,’” the casual reader might conclude that something resembling the Puritan Revolution was sneaking back into historio-graphical favor.

Between the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, four generations of the Stansfield family lived in Halifax—an upland parish in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Although its politics were calm, the century and a half between England's two great “revolutions” was not devoid of change in other respects. Significant social, economic, and cultural developments during this period laid the foundations for the ferment of the Industrial Revolution. The history of the Stansfield family is an excellent illustration of these changes, for there was a world of difference between the great-grandfather, Josias Stansfield, who was in his prime at the Restoration, and his great-grandsons, George and David Stansfield, who were in their primes a century later.

For his part, Josias was recognizably a man of the middling sort. A yeoman engaged in farming and small-scale textile production, his economic activities and his social standing place him in the ranks of families who fell between the few gentlemen who lived in the area and the mass of simple artisans and laborers who had to struggle just to survive. Josias's great-grandsons, George and David Stansfield lived in a different world. By the mid-eighteenth century, Halifax's textile industry was increasingly dominated by large-scale production of which George's large putting-out concern and David's substantial export business were typical. George and David's social position was also quite different. No longer merely comfortable, these two second cousins were among the wealthiest residents of their respective townships, and they had assumed an appropriately significant share of the political and social leadership in the parish.

By using Manx taxation and postal privileges, radicals and other activists were able to avoid the “taxes on knowledge,” to continue the campaign for a cheap press that mainland publishers, veterans of the “war of the unstamped,” had been forced to abandon in 1836. Free of stamp duty, paper duty, and advertizement tax, papers published on the Isle of Man were entitled to free postage throughout mainland Britain, a privilege extended to include re-postage in 1840. Taking advantage of these Manx facilities, publishers were able to defy commercial pressures to re-launch the “unstamped,” briefly recapturing its original political and educational mission. This paper seeks to recover this neglected episode in newspaper history. It highlights the use of Manx facilities by three broad groups of reformers, each of whom looked to the medium of the cheap press to redefine the reform agenda of early-Victorian Britain. First, those who promoted individual behavioral reform, a project that extended from temperance through various “alternative” remedies and regimes, physical and mental, to a bewildering array of “faddist” nostrums. Second, those involved in the increasing formalization of popular politics and associational culture, a process that placed print above traditional oral and visual modes of communication. Third, and closely related, those radicals who wished to expurgate earlier errors and excesses, to replace the transient tumult of the collective mass platform by individual commitment to rational reform. Each of these groups sought to benefit from Manx publication and postal privileges: through the widespread distribution of inexpensive propaganda; by the production of cheap “in-house” journals, which would provide channels of information for members of affiliated friendly societies, amalgamated trade unions, and political organizations; and by the packaging of news in cheap and attractive formats to reach the individual family home. These categories often overlapped, as did their formats; in the publications of William Shirrefs, the most enterprising of the Manx-based printers and publishers, newspaper, magazine, and “agitational” journal merged into one, providing a lively mixture of news, education, politics, information, fiction, amusement, and recreation, a comprehensive cheap package for the working-class reader. At a time of commercialization—the rise of the penny dreadful, the advent of the family magazine, and the dominance of the lurid Sunday press—the Manx press pointed towards the higher ideals of mid-Victorian Britain, providing its readership with the information and instruction to allow their personal and political development within the privacy of the home.

Edmund Pyle's oft-quoted account, though particularly caustic, is not unrepresentative of the views held by both contemporaries and historians about the duke of Newcastle as ecclesiastical minister. In the most comprehensive modern assessment of his role, Norman Sykes, while admitting that Newcastle was anxious “to fill the bench with good prelates,” portrays him as weak, vacillating, and incompetent. Moreover, and of more relevance to the concerns of this article, Sykes emphasizes the extent of Newcastle's power and influence in church affairs: like many of the duke's contemporaries he agrees with Pyle that Newcastle not only enjoyed virtually unquestioned control of Crown patronage, but that he also encroached on that of the lord chancellor and the bishops.

The resignation of William Pitt in 1801 remains one of the most controversial developments in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British parliamentary politics. At the time few believed that Pitt's dispute with George III over the issue of removing the political disabilities imposed on Roman Catholics in Ireland—also known as Catholic emancipation—was the real reason behind his decision, and many alternative explanations arose within parliamentary circles. Nevertheless, Pitt's closest adherents insisted that the Catholic question was solely responsible for the resignation, and this debate has been carried on by historians, with John Holland Rose and Richard Willis leading the side supporting Pitt's claim and David Barnes and Piers Mackesy the more sceptical side. Such a debate that has raged back and forth for almost two centuries might seem pedantic, but it deserves another look because historians should provide an accurate representation of events and the debate has overlooked some important aspects of the question. Moreover, the whole episode is relevant to the larger issue of the power relationship between the king and his ministers. Therefore, this article addresses four points: the degree of Pitt's commitment to Catholic emancipation; whether the resignation was constitutionally necessary; other factors that were involved in his decision to resign such as his physical and mental health and the serious divisions in the Cabinet over the war and how to handle the grain crisis; and the implications of the resignation for the relationship between the king and the executive.

The prevailing view of Quakers in the Restoration era depicts them as a defeated movement no longer on the attack but henceforth under siege. They institutionalized, in the words of Richard Bauman, a strategy “of disengagement from the world's affairs” and embraced “a social policy founded on quietism.” Defeated politically, they were forced, according to this view, to relinquish their efforts to advance the cause of liberty “by militant, political means.” Thus the adoption of the peace principle as a hallmark of the Society of Friends emerged, according to Barry Reay, as a response to political defeat and as a stratagem for survival. This interpretation of Restoration Quakerism is similar in many respects to the stereotypical depiction of the Friends in terms of withdrawal and quiescence. I would like to suggest some modifications in this view by reexamining Quaker expectations at the Restoration, the Friends' involvement in political and legal matters, and the emergence and enforcement of the peace principle. The dominant characteristics of Restoration Quakerism are not withdrawal and quiescence but engagement and vigor.

Slightly more than two decades ago in an article entitled “Scientists and society: the saints preserved” we began an historiographical intervention into the debate about the social origins of modern science. In that 1971 review essay we argued that recent work on the Restoration latitudinarians, particularly the important contribution of Barbara Shapiro, did not adequately account for the role played in latitudinarian thought by political and ecclesiastical interests. The time has come to return to the discussion. This occasion has been presented by the publication of a book of essays written for a conference held in 1987 at the Clark Library, entitled Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, and edited by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin. The volume constitutes one of the few recent contributions to an important debate about science and religion that was noisy in the 1970s and largely ignored during the Tory backlash of the 1980s. But the times are finally changing, and revitalization may now be occurring in British cultural and intellectual history. The newly edited volume stands at the cusp of the revitalization. It struggles to move forward to fresher approaches toward culture, i.e. toward the view that texts require historical and linguistic location. Yet the volume is trapped by those few contributors who are still wedded to conventions and attitudes now largely confined to the high churchmen of the 1980s.

The volume revolves around two themes: the nature of liberal English Protestantism after 1660 and the contested role of science in that mental and social construct. These are themes basic to English historiography in this century, if not before, and they are very much associated with the writings of Robert Merton and Christopher Hill. Their work largely focused on the mid-century Puritans; in the 1970s attention turned to the latitudinarians and their scientific associates, from Boyle to Newton.

“Friends, take heed of setting up that which God will throw down, lest you be found fighters against God.”

The nearly two decades comprising the period of the English Revolution were marked by a widespread interest in the timely appearance of the millennium, the thousand year period of Christ's promised earthly reign. From scholarly biblical studies of Daniel and Revelation to omens such as total eclipses of the sun and rumors of a Nottingham girl returning from the dead to warn a sinful world of approaching destruction, people in revolutionary England were bombarded with “evidence” of divine intervention and the expected arrival of the new kingdom. Parliament's victory in the English civil wars and its execution of Charles I in 1649 dramatically blew away the aura of divinity surrounding the monarchy and promised a new and glorious age. As they read prophecies in Revelation about a New Jerusalem where God would dry all tears and banish death, sorrow, and pain, enthusiasts of the seventeenth century anxiously looked for the Christ who promised, “Behold, I come quickly.” So prevalent were such notions that, as one authority has stressed, popular millenarianism seemed only a small step beyond received orthodoxy.

One of the pervading interpretations of Anglo-American relations in the interwar period is that the advent of James Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in June 1929 set in train the series of events that ended bitter relations between Britain and the United States, bitterness which had been caused by the naval question. There are several strands to this: first, that the American policy pursued by the Conservative second Baldwin government from November 1924 to June 1929, and especially after the failure of the Coolidge naval conference in the summer of 1927, was bankrupt; second, that MacDonald was more amenable to settling British differences with the Americans than were his Conservative predecessors and, that being so, softened the hardline towards the United States that had marked Conservative foreign and naval policy for more than two years; and, finally, that MacDonald's decision to travel to the United States on what proved to be a very successful visit in the autumn of 1929 to meet Herbert Hoover, the new president, to discuss outstanding issues personally, was a major diplomatic coup. Some of this received version is true. No one can doubt that MacDonald and his Labour ministry played a crucial role in helping to ameliorate the crisis that had been dogging good Anglo-American relations for more than two years before June 1929. The Labour Party constituted the government when the London naval conference of 1930 ended the period of Anglo-American naval rivalry. Moreover, for six months before that conference convened, Labour had conducted effective diplomacy in preparing for its deliberations.