Whereas both Houses of the Parliament of England have been necessitated to undertake a war in their just and lawful defense … all oaths, declarations, and proclamations against both or either of the Houses of Parliament … or their ordinances and proceedings, or any for adhering unto them, or for doing or executing any office, place or charge, by any authority derived from them; and all judgments, indictments, outlawries, attainders and inquisitions in any the said causes … be declared null, suppressed, and forbidden. (From the first of nineteen Newcastle Propositions, July 1646; expanded from the first of twenty-seven Propositions of Uxbridge, November 1644; repeated in the second of The Four Bills, December 1647)

Indemnity Committee cases from the 1647–55 manuscripts indicate a widespread volume of suits pressed against parliament's Civil War and Commonwealth officeholders. Invariably, the officials petitioning the Indemnity Committee were under prosecution. Often they had been fined and even jailed. Also revealed in these papers is a public knowledgeable in the law and ready to wield its power in punishing an array of officials in London and the shires. Four broad conclusions are asserted here. First, the Indemnity Committee records reflect a massive legal assault on state officials from the beginning of the Civil War to the mid-1650s, a factor in the political, administrative, and social history of the period that has heretofore been ignored. Second, suits were lodged mainly as the result of actions stemming from fiscal innovations put into place by a parliament that pushed toward victory and then struggled to pay its war debts.

The troubles of Thomas Pestell came to a head at Lambeth on 21 November 1633. He was the victim of an improbable alliance between a godly nobleman, a Laudian judge, three alehouse keepers, a few tithe resisters, some Ashby nonconformists, “mad Stacey,” and a determined troublemaker. This ambitious Leicestershire parson, already embittered by failure, was humiliated by the Court of High Commission. Led by Archbishop Laud, the court declared that Pestell “had to the scandal and reproach of his ministerial function many ways demeaned himself”: he was ordered to grovel before his critics and pay his enemies' expenses. It could have been very much worse. The offenses of contempt of ecclesiastical authority, admitting excommunicates to communion, and performing clandestine marriages, “although they were in themselves no way justifiable but worthy of severe punishment,” were set aside for the moment and never resurfaced. An allegation of vexatious litigation had already been dropped, a charge of seditious preaching was “not sufficiently proved,” and “for his quarrelling and fighting, and giving cause to have him bound to the peace before the temporal judges, this the court much misliked though they would not censure him for it.” Formally, Pestell was only punished for jeering at the earl of Huntingdon, mocking Sir John Lambe, and sending two of his parishioners on a wild-goose chase—but his once-promising career was in ruins.

Thomas Pestell was born in 1585, the son of a Leicester tailor. He went to Cambridge as a sizar, took his M.A. in 1609, and was presented to the Leicestershire rectory of Coleorton by Sir Thomas Beaumont in 1611.

We need not wonder at Aerial Knights, At elemental combats, and strange fights, when earthly monarchs thus renew their jars, and even all Europe is involv'd in wars. (William Lux, Poems on Several Occasions)

On 6 March 1716, the Historical Register featured a description of an extravagant “display” of sky lights above London. The newspaper reported that during the evening, a number of Londoners noticed something that at first appeared like a huge and motionless body of light that in a curtain-like shape hung over the sky. They then saw it starting to move in a random fashion and dissolve into parts, spreading toward the west and changing into gigantic “pillars of flame.” From the west horizon and with an incredible velocity the lights continued to dart southeastward. After a series of undulatory motions and vibrations, they turned into a “continual fulguration, interspersed with green, red, blue, and yellow.” What were they? The celebrated astronomer Edmund Halley wrote that he was afraid that in delivering the “Etiology of a Matter so uncommon, never before seen by myself, nor fully described by any of the Ancient and Moderns, I fail to answer [philosophers'] Expectation or my own Desires.” But the less scholarly sources had less trouble. In Oxford, people saw swords and cavalries in the sky. In Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire, two heavenly armies waged a war that was so close that the air smelled of gunpowder.

Some translation and joining of realms may turn to much good, and the wealth and tranquillity of many. As if we had a King for your Queen, or you [Scotland] a King for ours, it had been a goodly translation: to have united both realms in dominion, regiment and law, as they be in nature, language, and manners…. If you and we had joined together: it had made no great matter, on which side the King had been, so he had been religious…. It is religion and likeness of manners, that join men together … Where there is one faith, one baptism, and one Christ: there is narrower fraternity then, if they came out of one womb. (John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithful and Trew Subjectes, 1559)

Me-thinketh it were to be wished of all wise men and her Majesty's good subjects, that the one of those two Queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be an unity of the whole isle. (Henry Killigrew to Robert Dudley, 31 December 1560)

In 1559, John Aylmer responded to John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in order to win support for Elizabeth I's accession to the English throne. According to Aylmer, Knox identified as the “greatest inconvenience” of female rule the fact that the realm would be transferred to “strangers” when the queen married, ceding to her husband, as her superior, the power that had been invested in her.

The relationship between popular religious attitudes and the English Reformation has long been the subject of a fierce historical debate. The older “Whig-Protestant” view, championed most notably by A. G. Dickens, draws on evidence for clerical corruption and the spread of Lollardy to show that large numbers of English people were dissatisfied with the state of Catholicism, eager for religious change, and on the whole receptive to Protestant ideas. According to this version of events, Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament rode a wave of popular discontent in breaking from Rome and dissolving the monasteries. If there was a split between the king and the masses, it came only later when Henry's conservative religious beliefs caused him to attempt to retain much of the substance of Catholicism in the face of popular clamor for more thoroughgoing reform. On the other hand, the “revisionist” camp, which includes such well-known names as J. J. Scarisbrick, Christopher Haigh, and Eamon Duffy, prefers to cite evidence from wills, local parish records, liturgical books, and devotional texts to show that “the Church was a lively and relevant social institution, and the Reformation was not the product of a long-term decay of medieval religion.” In this view, Henry VIII and his advisors pushed through a personally advantageous but widely disliked and resisted Reformation.

An examination of the religious content of the tales men and women told about Robin Hood in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries offers a fresh perspective on this long-running dispute.

The eighteenth century marked a watershed in the relationship between women and historical writing in Britain. Previous to this period, D. R. Woolf has demonstrated, women had certainly purchased, read, and discussed works of history, contributing to “the ‘social circulation’ of historical knowledge.” A few, perhaps most notably Lucy Hutchinson, had composed Civil War memoirs. Some women had written genealogical, antiquarian, and biographical works, as well as local and family history, a “feminine past,” according to Woolf, that men often judged unworthy of real history. Only in the eighteenth century, however, did women and men significantly modify a neoclassical paradigm that conceived of history as a strictly male enterprise, the record of political and military deeds written by men and for men. In this century prescriptive literature increasingly urged history upon women as reading matter intellectually and morally superior to novels and romances. The great triumvirate of British historians, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson, wrote expressly for female readers. Their “philosophical” history, with its shift of emphasis from political to social and cultural subjects, appealed to women, as did their experiments with the narrative techniques of sentimental fiction. The century also witnessed the appearance of the first female historian in Britain to write in the grand manner, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). Mrs. Macaulay's success in the traditional genre of history won her the respect of male peers as well as the applause of a wide readership.

In 1956, Martha Gellhorn spent an evening exploring the uncharted territory of London's espresso bars. Her impressions were recorded in an article on “the younger generation”: “Full of expectations and ignorance, I made the long sight-seeing trip through the Espresso-bar country of London, stared at the young natives, and came gladly home at last with many pictures in my mind but little understanding …. The youthful Espresso-ites remained hopelessly strangers, in their strange, small, chosen land; I can only report what I have seen.” Gellhorn's account was punctuated by references to the “strangeness” of her experience. The decor of the bars invoked “distant places” with “bull-fight posters, bamboo, tropical plants, an occasional shell or Mexican mask.” As she traveled through this “strange country,” the sight of a tortilla was “terrifying,” the customers' clothing was breathtakingly exotic, and their skin tones suggested amalgams such as “Chinese-Javanese-Siamese” or “Spanish-Arab-Cuban.” At times, Gellhorn heard French and Italian spoken freely among the espresso bars' young patrons.

The foreign topography of youth culture described by Gellhorn was not unusual among accounts of young people in the 1950s, yet until recently this period has been characterized principally as a time of social peace and political apathy, “an age of prosperity and achievement” shaped by “consensus” and a return to normality after the disruption and sacrifices of the Second World War. Following an extended period of austerity, the welfare state and the managed economy seemed to have ensured full employment and an unprecedented standard of living, while the election of successive Conservative governments in 1951, 1955, and 1959 has been explained as the political reflection of rising personal prosperity and security.

As the number and interests of charitable institutions expanded throughout Britain during the eighteenth century, so special fund-raising events, anniversary celebrations, and meetings multiplied. During 1775, for example, the major metropolitan charities and a plethora of minor benevolent societies courted middle- and upper-class Londoners with invitations to concerts and exhibitions. Men could support various hospitals and other good causes by dining in taverns and City Livery Halls in company with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries, even noble and royal dukes. Both men and women might attend charities' anniversary services, ornamented with special music and a sermon, choosing among dispensaries, hospitals, lying-in charities, religious societies, and various efforts to reform and reclaim the poor for public benefit. On Sundays, armed with tickets, special prayer books, and even keys to their rented pews, women and men might attend the chapel of a philanthropic institution. Alternatively, they could listen to a fund-raising sermon and watch charity-school children arrayed in the gallery of a parish church. Toward the end of the year, they might pay half a guinea each to hear Handel's Messiah in the Foundling Hospital Chapel or go to Covent Garden and Drury Lane to watch tragedies and farces. Charitable activity thus extended beyond churches, alms, and sermons into the theater. It spilled onto the streets as gentlemen processed to dinner; it accompanied art and music. Conversely, waves of fashion drove visitors to one philanthropic institution or another to see deserving recipients, hear a particularly popular preacher, or to be observed themselves.

Race—as a category—has commonly been understood as a response to difference. In the first instance, race offered a means of ordering unfamiliar peoples, whether encountered in the empire or at home. In the European historiography, the notion of “biological” race, defined by an inherited set of characteristics passed through the blood, possesses a particular genealogy: its roots can be found in the eighteenth century, its fullest articulation came in the late nineteenth century, and its twentieth-century decline was hastened by the Holocaust.

This article sets out a different, if not completely incompatible, thesis. It takes the case of British Jews to argue that racial categories could arise as a response to the apparent similarities, as well as the perceived differences, between Jews and other Britons. Put differently, in the late nineteenth century, Jews came increasingly to be identified as a race precisely because they were difficult to differentiate from their fellow citizens. Class proved a critical determinant. Jews became ever more invisible as they scaled the social ladder. “East End” Jews—poor and newly immigrated—might be readily detectable, but their middle- and upper-middle-class “West End” counterparts confounded observers. Notions of race, I will argue, emerged in part as a consequence of assimilation, delimiting difference in a nation where formal legal barriers to Jewish integration had been eliminated and social obstacles largely overcome.

Race was a staple term of the late nineteenth century. It proliferated throughout the language of the time.

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

In 1898, after forty-five years of enforcing mandatory infant smallpox vaccination, the British parliament passed an act to allow parents to “opt out” of the compulsory system. The 1898 Vaccination Act introduced a conscience clause that entitled parents who objected to the practice of vaccination to claim certificates of conscientious objection by applying to a magistrate for an exemption. This provided working- and lower-middle-class anti-vaccinationists a measure of relief from the repeated fines they had suffered for noncompliance with the law, and from the threat of imprisonment. By the end of 1898, over 200,000 certificates of conscientious objection had been issued. Many of these were granted in anti-vaccination strongholds where exemptions outnumbered vaccinations, but conscientious objection to vaccination was by no means limited to these regions. Once an amended conscience clause was passed in 1907, which made conscientious objector status much easier to attain, the national exemption rate grew to 25 percent of all births.

The vaccination conscience clauses were controversial. As most of the applicants who applied for these exemption certificates came from the working classes, and many were women, these acts generated a national debate over the classed and gendered nature of the conscience and the meanings of conscientious objection. The years between 1898 and 1907 thus mark a significant moment in the making of the modern subject and citizen. For, as the debate over conscientious objection to vaccination reveals, who exactly was entitled to make a claim to possess a conscience, with its concomitant rights, was itself a contested issue.

This is a history of life after death—not the life of a disembodied soul, but of the body left behind in a prison yard, buried in quicklime. It is a history composed of family members, friends, politicians, and bureaucrats drawn into cooperation and conflict by the politics of rebellion, partition, and sexuality in Ireland and Great Britain. The deceased in dispute, Roger Casement, had been a controversial figure during the later years of his life, knighted by the British Crown in 1911 for his advocacy of humanitarian causes in Africa and South America and then hanged by the British government on 3 August 1916 for conspiring with Germany to mobilize and arm Irish separatists. Casement had requested that his body be buried at Murlough Bay, near his family's home in County Antrim in the province of Ulster. Instead, Casement's body was buried at Pentonville Prison in London, and for almost fifty years the British government rejected the appeals of Casement's family and supporters for the repatriation of his body to Ireland. In 1965, the body was finally exhumed and reinterred at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, following a state funeral.

Why did the British government take over fifty years to disinter Casement's body from Pentonville, and why was his request to be buried at Murlough Bay not honored? In exploring the answers to these questions, I focus on negotiations between the British and Irish governments, and the terms of their final agreement over the present location of Casement's remains.

When the Imperial War Museum was founded in early 1917, the subcommittee in charge of collections related to “Women's Work” solicited contributions from Dr. Flora Murray of the Military Hospital at Endell Street in London. Murray and Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson had formed the Women's Hospital Corps and, with the French Red Cross, opened hospitals in Paris and Wimereux in the early stages of the war. After successful cooperation with British military and medical authorities overseas, they were asked to open the Endell Street facility, the only hospital operating under the auspices of the War Office to be staffed entirely by women. Murray refused to cooperate with the museum committee “because she wished her hospital to be considered purely professionally as a military hospital and not as women's war work.”

This was not just rhetoric of women's equality from someone who described herself as “one of Mrs. Pankhurst's lot,” but reflected the new emphasis on professionalism that had developed in the preceding fifty years. The First World War provided new opportunities for work in a variety of fields more or less closely related to the perpetuation and advancement of the armed conflict; scholars have recently focused in particular on working-class women in industry and paramilitary organizations. Though opportunities for educated women increased throughout civil society, my focus here is on work that was perceived as explicitly on behalf of the war effort, with a special concentration on three populations of women working in hospitals: doctors, trained nurses, and volunteers.

On 31 October 1847, the John Williams, a ship of the London Missionary Society, left Gravesend for the Pacific Islands from whence it had come. Its cargo included five thousand Bibles and four thousand copies of The Pilgrim's Progress in Tahitian. Like other such mission ships, the John Williams had been funded by the pennies and shillings of Sunday school subscription and had become a huge media spectacle. It was but one of the many international propaganda exercises at which mission organizations so excelled.

This picture of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678 and 1684) at the center of an international web is an appropriate one. Written in the wake of the English Revolution, the book had rapidly been disseminated to Protestant Europe and North America. By the late 1700s, it had reached India and by the early 1800s, Africa. Yet, some one hundred years on, this avowedly international image of The Pilgrim's Progress had been turned inside out. From being a book of the world, it had become a book of England. Today, John Bunyan is remembered as a supremely English icon, and his most famous work is still studied as the progenitor of the English novel. Roger Sharrock, in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, best exemplifies this pervasive trend of analysis. His introduction begins by acknowledging Bunyan's international presence, but this idea is then snapped off from the “real” Bunyan who is local, Puritan, and above all English.

At a cabinet meeting on November 4, 1956, Anthony Eden came face to face with the unravelling of his ill-starred premiership. As two leading cabinet colleagues, Lord Butler and Lord Salisbury, insisted that British military operations in Egypt would have to be ended, the prime minister found it impossible to repress any longer his overwrought and excitable temperament. According to the journalist James Margach, “Eden was emotionally overcome. He broke down in tears and cried: ‘You are all deserting me.’ He was in total collapse, weeping unashamedly. Then he went upstairs to compose himself.” Within two months Eden had resigned. His successor, Harold Macmillan, deliberately set out to create a very different emotional environment around him. In place of Eden's petulant volatility came an emphasis on self-control and steady nerves. In the words of David Maxwell Fyfe, who served under both premiers, Eden's “chronic restlessness” gave way to “a central calmness” under Macmillan. The new prime minister adopted an air of nonchalance and indifference, and according to one of his aides, “anyone who got excited got short shrift.” The contrasting public styles of Eden and Macmillan is a commonplace in the political history of the 1950s and has been credited with facilitating the recovery in Conservative electoral fortunes in the aftermath of the Suez debacle. However, Eden's breakdown and Macmillan's apparent “unflappability” can also be identified as sites on which to explore how dominant codes of masculine emotional culture were manifested in the world of politics.