When I first began my researches into later Stuart history as a graduate student back in 1980, the Restoration was a relatively underdeveloped field of inquiry. Although there were a number of scholars producing excellent work in this area, there was not the same depth of scholarship as characterized study of the first half of the seventeenth century: wide gaps in our knowledge existed, and for some of the most crucial episodes of the period we were dependent upon a limited range of studies and dated works. The best general entrée into the period was still David Ogg's classic two-volume England in the Reign of Charles II, first published in 1934! A suitable modern textbook did not emerge until 1978, with the publication of J. R. Jones's County and Court: England 1658–1714, a book that had neither Ogg's range nor lively analytical style. For our understanding of why the monarchy was restored we were reliant upon a study that had come out in 1955, which was supplemented only in 1980 by Austin Woolrych's book-length “Historical Introduction” to volume seven of the Yale edition of the Complete Prose Works of John Milton. On the Exclusion Crisis we had J. R. Jones's The First Whigs, which had appeared in 1961, although for the first Tories we still needed to use Sir Keith Feiling's 1924 History of the Tory Party. For the Glorious Revolution we had a book written by a man who tragically died (at a young age) before he could complete the work, and another self-consciously thought-provoking work designed to raise questions and suggest future avenues of research—both excellent studies in their own right, but hardly the plethora of monographs that we possessed for the mid-century revolution.

The industrial revolution greatly expanded opportunities to become wealthy, but not all opportunities were “legitimate.” Most writers emphasize that the context, or social structure, in which laws are framed make aspects of commercial behavior “illegal” or “criminal.” The context is an imposed evaluation of modes of behavior and action based on conflict resolution. This generalization has merit and, irrespective of ideological nuance, neatly packages the process through which social interest is said to attain legislative legitimacy. Such achieved legitimacy is, however, sometimes challenged, notwithstanding the participation of the challengers themselves in the process of formulation. The letter as well as the spirit of laws may be ignored, and illegal activities may flourish. These white-collar crimes—offenses against property committed by persons of “respectability and high social status”—tend to be ascribed to individual greed and opportunities created by weaknesses in the enforcement of the laws. Businessmen are damned by implication, and the solution usually recommended is more consultation, more laws, and better enforcement. Recent studies of the increasing incidence of such crimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have adopted this interpretation to criticize the new entrepreneurial culture. Complaints have been directed particularly at a “chaotic” banking system that abetted supposedly widespread speculation and fraud during and following the Napoleonic wars. Proofs of misconduct rest on contemporary calls to curb the extravagances of entrepreneurs and private bankers, on references to repeated financial crises, on a few famous cases of fraud and robbery, and on a more general indictment culled from literature's many mustache-twirling villains.

While Henry II and John's bitter quarrels with the Church have inspired much comment from both contemporaries and modern scholars, Richard Lionheart's relations with the English Church have attracted little notice. The lack of theatrical clashes with the pope or the archbishop of Canterbury has led modern scholars to assume that Richard I enjoyed fortunate relations with his clergy. Richard's most recent biographer has viewed him as “a conventionally pious man,” and contemporary chroniclers depicted him as fitting the Church's definition of the perfect knight whose financial exactions and other faults could be overlooked because of his crusader status.

Almost continuously absent from England, the Lionheart is assumed to have had little opportunity to assert his will in ecclesiastical matters. Yet, Richard I was as determined as his father and brother to defend English monarchs' traditional rights over the Church, because their mastery over such a powerful institution conferred many advantages. Their bishops were also barons who advised the king at great councils, who often held posts in the royal administration, and who owed feudal obligations, even quotas of knights. The royal right of regalia gave Richard custody of church lands during an episcopal vacancy and the right to authorize new elections and to approve bishops-elect.

Sir Christopher Cheney, a leading authority on the twelfth-century Church, observed that Richard I was “forever busy with the English Church.” An examination of the Lionheart's ecclesiastical policy proves him correct, revealing a monarch who had little respect for the Church's freedom and worked to preserve his royal predecessors's authority over it. Richard took care to oversee closely English episcopal elections.

On 4 September 1537, Sir Thomas Wharton wrote Thomas Cromwell triumphantly proclaiming the Tudor triumph in the north of England. “In the late Lord Dacre's day,” Wharton declared, “there was a cry of ‘A Dacre, a Dacre,’ and afterward, ‘A Clifford, a Clifford,’ and even then, ‘A Dacre, a Dacre.’ Now [there is] only ‘A King, a King.’” In addition to proclaiming royal supremacy in the north, Wharton also was noting a pattern of persistent change in officeholding in the far north, from Dacre to Clifford, and back to the Dacres. The shifts of fortune among the northern nobility under the Tudors have received considerable attention from scholars. Most importantly, Mervyn James has argued for a gradual Tudor revolution in the north, in which the government slowly replaced traditional noble elites with royal appointees. In several case studies Richard Hoyle has challenged James's interpretation of the behavior of particular nobles, and George Bernard has mounted an often persuasive jeremiad against James and others who have seen an essential conflict during the Tudor period between Crown and nobility. Both Hoyle and Bernard question James' assumption of a natural hostility between king and nobility, arguing, in Hoyle's words, for a relationship that “operated to their mutual and reciprocal benefits.

John Tucker was a member of Parliament for the borough of Weymouth between 1735–47 and again between 1754–78. The relevant entries for him in the volumes of the History of Parliament are exiguous. He appears to have made only two interventions in Commons debates, on 27 February 1771 and 30 April 1772. In John Brooke's words, both were “slight and short.” According to the History of Parliament, Tucker's political stance was determined largely by his relationship with George Bubb Dodington, although the evidence is capable, as we shall see, of being read in a different way. Romney Sedgwick quotes from a letter Dodington wrote to Sir Robert Walpole in 1737, following the famous division on the Prince of Wales's allowance, that “the connexion between these gentlemen [those identified with his interest, including Tucker] and me was such that we should not have differed in opinion” even had he decided to vote for the motion. Tucker emerges from the History of Parliament volumes as a man without political views of his own and as an individual tightly caught up in a politics shaped principally by interest and management.

This article exploits a hitherto neglected source to reconstruct more fully John Tucker's political world and views, to present a different account of his political stance and importance, and thus to throw considerable light on politics in the mid-eighteenth century. This source is a manuscript collection that the Bodleian Library acquired in 1969 and 1970. The collection mostly comprises the papers of John Tucker's father, Edward, his brother, Richard, and John himself.

During the Victorian period the link between Irish immigration, crime, and disorder in England was widely regarded by contemporary observers as axiomatic. In 1836 the Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain devoted four pages to the examination of Irish criminality, noting that “the Irish in the larger towns of Lancashire commit more crimes than an equal number of natives of the same places,” and in 1839 the Report of the Constabulary Commissioners observed that in the towns of South Lancashire, “when large bodies of Irish of less orderly habits, and far more prone to the use of violence in fits of intoxication settled permanently in these towns, the existing police force, which was sufficient to repress crime and disorders among a purely English population, has been found, under these altered circumstances, inadequate to the regular enforcement of the law.”

The belief that the Irish in England were the harbingers of crime was by no means novel. With the substantial increase in Irish immigration during the early Victorian period, the host society's widespread belief in the innate criminality of the Irish—and, more particularly, of the Irish poor—formed an integral component of the negative side of the Irish stereotype. Witness, for example, Thomas Carlyle's much-quoted view that “in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence” the Irishman constituted “the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder,” or Henry Mayhew's assertion that “as a body, moreover, the habitual criminals of London are said to be, in nine cases out of ten, ‘Irish Cockneys,’ that is, persons born of Irish parents in the Metropolis.”

The last fourteen years of John Stuart Mill's life (1859-1873), which followed the death of Harriet Taylor, possessed a hefty political content. They saw the publication of his essays on parliamentary reform and Considerations on Representative Government, his impassioned identification with the North in the American Civil War, the eventful parliamentary career sandwiched between the Westminster elections of 1865 and 1868, and a final phase of activity associated with causes such as women's suffrage and land tenure reform. When Mill acted politically he usually did so with strong feeling, but in his search to give deeply held principles practical effect he understood the need for dispassionate adaptation of means to ends. Both the feeling and the adaptation are evident in his treatment of the elementary education question in 1870, a treatment that vividly illustrates how Mill operated during the decade and a half before his death.

Of the host of legislation Gladstone's first administration proposed, only one item, the 1870 Education Bill, elicited a congregation of public responses from Mill. Of course, Mill's political activity in the several years following his defeat at Westminster in autumn 1868 was not confined to the adoption of a stance on ministerial measures. With respect to women's suffrage and land reform Mill was not about to wait on any government, and his conspicuous connections with the National Society for Women's Suffrage and the Land Tenure Reform Association attracted notice at the time and have been the subject of comment since. Moreover, during his last years Mill continued to cultivate his contacts in the world of London working-class radicalism, particularly with George Odger, William Randal Cremer, and George Howell. Whereas Mill's parliamentary career has been explored in some detail, the political character of his post-Westminster years has received less attention.

Between 1839 and 1848, the government and legal authorities in England and Wales were confronted with a popular movement of unprecedented size and energy. The numbers involved in active protest and in actual or potential disorder were much greater, and they were diffused over a wider geographical area and longer timespan, than any other protest movement up to recent times. Many departments of the political and legal system were engaged at some level in dealing with Chartist activity, from the Crown and Home Office to the local magistrates and special constables.

In 1839 committals for protest crimes comprised 5 percent of all committals to the assizes and quarter sessions. The figures for 1842 and 1848 were 7.5 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. In some areas the percentage was much higher. Committals for indictable riotous offenses in Lancashire in 1842 totaled 12 percent of all committals, and those in Staffordshire 19.5 percent. Nearly 2,000 Chartists were committed for trial at the assizes alone. About four times that number passed through the lower courts. Just under 90 percent of Chartists tried at the assizes were convicted.

Mid-nineteenth century elections in England's small towns were vividly described in contemporary fiction. For example, Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers included the Eatanswill contest in which a bucolic exuberance among voters rendered irrelevant the political differences between candidates Slumkey and Fizkin. Who could blame the enfranchised mob for their behavior during polling when “Excisable articles were remarkably cheap at all the public houses,” producing an epidemic of dizziness “under which they [the voters] might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility.” Following his bitter experience in unsuccessfully contesting Beverley in East Yorkshire, one of the Eatanswills of the sixties, Anthony Trollope parodied the election in Ralph the Heir when he took his readers to Percycross, where the Conservative Sir Thomas Underwood managed to edge out Ontario Moggs, the radical bootmaker. Similarly, at Trollope's Silverbridge (in The Prime Minister), the levers of the “Castle” interest had long been pulled by the ironmonger Sprugeon and the cork sole maker Sprout, issues and principles apparently being of peripheral importance.

The nuclear age opened in prayer:

Thus did United States Army Chaplain William B. Downey bless the anxious crew of the Enola Gay in the quiet, early hours of 6 August 1945. After the aircraft's successful mission and return to the tiny island of Tinian, both President Harry Truman and former Prime Minister Winston Churchill ended their official announcements of the “mastery” of nuclear power and the destruction of Hiroshima with their own benedictions. To Truman, preoccupied with the imminent close of the war, the chief blessings to be offered were strategic: “We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” For Churchill, now uncomprehendingly in political opposition, the appropriate prayers were far more ambiguous:

Public parks offered many attractions to Victorian Londoners: natural beauty, healthful fresh air, facilities for sports and socializing, and grounds for civic pride. The efforts of individuals, private groups, and government officials increased the number of public parks in the metropolis from about a dozen at mid-century to more than 200 in 1898. Parks became integral parts of city life and stimulated the development of a diverse community of park users. These citizens did not hesitate to express their views about appropriate behavior for public space, demonstrating their role in the public sphere. While park users differed in class, gender, age, religion, and politics, most agreed that the city's public spaces should encourage “respectability” and good citizenship, especially as an example to children. When these values, vaguely defined though they were, seemed threatened by specific park behaviors, the community displayed a remarkable consensus. Two particular types of park use—public displays of affection by “courting couples” and the presence of “verminous persons” (mostly vagrants)—aroused public opinion in the 1890s and early 1900s to moral panic. Reluctant royal and municipal park authorities were pressured into passing more restrictive park laws in both cases, though the “problems” themselves did not disappear.

This article explores how these crises developed and why public reaction to them was so vehement. The material reality behind the “courting couples” and “verminous persons” crises, as far as can be determined, seems not to justify the level of outrage that occurred. The strength of public reaction must reflect the extreme sensitivity of a culturally unstable community in the process of redefining itself and its values. Public parks changed patterns of social interaction in the late Victorian city, bringing diverse citizens into proximity by creating new common spaces. Early nineteenth-century class discrimination against workers and the poor in public space then gave way to a new form of exclusion that emphasized individual behavior rather than inherited status.

For all the recognition of the immense importance of Catholic Emancipation, both in itself and for what it is supposed to have led to (most notably, parliamentary reform), significant questions still surround it. Why, after Daniel O'Connell's victory in County Clare in June 1828 precipitated a crisis, did that crisis drag on for more than six months of perpetual wavering and mixed signals from the British government? Why was a cabinet not summoned? Why did the prime minister so long refuse either to confide in or to remove the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland? Finally, what was the likely effect of these months of shuffling and confusion in shaping the course of politics in the years to come?

The Duke of Wellington is central to answering such questions. Before 1828, Wellington was a key player whose doubts and fears were broadly representative of those that reshaped the positions of many of emancipation's most powerful opponents and brought them around to the necessity of accepting the measure. In 1828 and 1829 as prime minister, Wellington made decisions that were critical in determining how the measure would be carried. Some of those decisions had an important bearing on how emancipation was received in the country and therefore on the political divisions that followed.

The explanation usually given for the government's failure to act is that the king refused to permit it and would not allow the cabinet to consider the matter. In January, when the king asked Wellington to form a government, he had stipulated and the duke had agreed that Catholic Emancipation should not be a government measure.

The last fifteen years have seen an efflorescence of scholarly studies of British fascism between the wars. Once identified exclusively with the figure of Sir Oswald Mosley and dismissed as a wholly derivative imitation of its Italian and German counterparts, fascism in Britain is now understood as a complex and variegated phenomenon whose roots run no less extensively in British political culture than in external influences. As historians have probed more deeply into the ideological underpinnings of the British ultra-right, they have made increasingly apparent the numerous connections between this new form of political mobilization and long-standing tensions within British politics and society. While scholars continue to acknowledge the many important ways in which British fascism was indebted to its Continental equivalents, they can no longer maintain—as did Robert Benewick in 1969 in his groundbreaking survey of the radical right—that fascist policy was developed “with a callous disregard for principles” or that the distinctively fascist elements of British ultra-right ideology were imported en bloc from overseas.

It is all the more surprising that existing histories should have overlooked so completely one of the most important “indigenous” components of British fascist ideology - its preoccupation with the Irish question. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Irish sentiment became a principal theme of several leading fascist groups, exceeded in prominence only by anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, to which it was often explicitly linked. For these small, politically marginal societies, the formulation and dissemination of hibernophobic ideas held obvious attractions.