Among the churches of nineteenth-century Britain, the Anglican Church held a unique, and somewhat embarrassing, position. It was, of course, the established Church of England—an arm of the state, assigned the honor and duty of serving as the focus and guide of the nation's spiritual life. Its position was embarrassing by the mid-nineteenth century because it obviously was not fulfilling its ostensible role. The increasingly secular nature of industrial society on the one hand, and the Christian challenge of Nonconformity on the other, cost the Church membership among all classes of people. That loss significantly undermined the Anglican claim that the established Church served the religious needs of the whole nation, and it led to persistent Nonconformist cries for disestablishment. Furthermore, Christianity's appeal to its traditional following, the poor and lowly, seemed to evaporate in the industrial environment of the Victorian city. Not only did typical urban workers not go to church (or chapel, for that matter), they were generally rather hostile to organized religion and particularly to the Anglican Church. In the Church of governors and employers, where services and sermons often could appeal only to the educated, workers felt, not unjustly, uncomfortable and unwelcome.

There were several internal impediments to increasing the popularity (and thereby the social influence) of the Anglican Church, not the least of which was the dominant theology of early Victorian England. During what Boyd Hilton has called the “Age of Atonement” (roughly the first half of the nineteenth century), evangelical thought both shaped and justified the economic and social assumptions which underlay the policies of competitive capitalism.

As the first official English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe found himself at the outer reaches of English knowledge, experience, and influence in the early seventeenth century. This article examines the difficult position Roe felt himself to occupy, triangulating between the different interests he represented—his own interests, those of the East India Company that employed him, and those of the Crown that accredited him. Roe's letters revealed his difficulties in conducting what he saw as the essential tasks of the ambassador, and his limited success in establishing his status and authority both at the Mughal court and over the Company factors in India. As someone at the forefront of English overseas activities in the early seventeenth century, Roe's experiences shed light on the lived experience of English expansion. His case demonstrates the difficulties of adapting the tools of Tudor-Stuart statecraft to England's widening global reach.

“And now the new system of government came into being. For the first time since the accession of the House of Hanover, the Tory party was in the ascendant.” So wrote Lord Macaulay concerning the early years of George III's reign. In Macaulay's essay on the earl of Chatham one can find all the elements of the Whig myth of the reign of George III. Most of these ideas have been safely laid to rest by Sir Lewis Namier and modern research; we now know that there was neither a new system of government at the accession of the king nor anything resembling a Tory party. George III was not the tyrant depicted in the Declaration of Independence, there was no plot in the imagined cabinet of “king's friends” to overthrow the constitution, and when, with respect to the colonies, the king declared that he would abide by the decision of his Parliament, he was taking a stand on the side of Whig principles and the Revolution Settlement.

One element in the putative resurgence of Toryism that Macaulay and other Whig historians emphasized was High-Anglican political theology. G. H. Guttridge, for example, in his English Whiggism and the American Revolution (1942) well understood the differences between the Toryism of the period of the American Revolution and that of the earlier century. Tories had come to accept the Revolution Settlement, the Hanoverian succession, and even “a modicum of religious toleration.” But if they had lost the bloom of monarchical sentiment, they retained the concept of a state unified above sectional and party interests. Guttridge's formulas were admittedly too simplistic and they justly invited criticism, but one of the overlooked merits of his work was that he located the continuity of conservative thought in its religious aspect. He observed that, “Standing for the two great Tory principles, national unity and a religious sanction for the established order, the Church of England was the central institution of Toryism—the state in its religious aspect, and the divine principle in monarchical government.” The demolition of the Whig interpretation, however, has resulted in a thorough-going neglect of political discourse, and several notable examples of this deconstruction bear directly upon Anglican political thought. In his introduction to the History of Parliament John Brooke wrote that during the American Revolution the Anglican clergy in England had no specific attitude toward the war or any other aspect of government policy. When the reprint of G. H. Guttridge's essay appeared in 1963, Ian Christie wrote a vigorous rebuttal to the idea of a revival of Toryism in the early part of George III's reign without a single reference to the Anglican Church.

In February of 1885 news was flashed to England from Egypt that General Gordon was dead, stabbed by an Arab spear as the hordes of the Mahdi were overrunning the city of Khartoum in the Sudan. Dead he certainly was and nothing could resurrect him, and yet he has survived in the pages of biography, in the comments of the press, and in the mythology of culture. His “after-life” reveals some interesting facts about the nature of hero-worship and the role heroes play in the ethos of a national people and their self-image.

Charles George Gordon was born in January, 1833, the second son of a military family. He was trained for the military, too, became a Royal Engineer, and fought in the Crimean War. He saw service in Turkey, and then was sent to China where he gained fame in the suppression of the Taiping rebellion against the Manchu Empire in 1864, earning the nickname of “Chinese Gordon” at home and a Companion of the Bath from a grateful English government. The next six years he spent in service at Gravesend, constructing defensive fortifications, and devoting much of his time to rehabilitative work with the poor street boys of the town. Another six years he spent in Equatorial Sudan in an unsuccessful struggle to eliminate the slave trade. A brief period as Secretary to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India, was followed by service in Mauritius, and fighting against the Basuto uprising in South Africa for the Cape Government. The penultimate year of his life he wandered in the Holy Land, and finally he answered the call to return to the Sudan, which was threatened by the revolt of Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi.

In recent decades, several historians, including myself, have argued that many nineteenth-century British urban elites were akin to a sort of new squirearchy. The intention of this article is to explore how far this idea enables us to better understand the role, power, and style of urban leadership, and the political, social, and economic context in which it existed. Given that the termination point is 1914, it also examines how much the notion has to say about political change in the rapidly expanding urban context after around 1850. The notion of a “new squirearchy” implies two things about nineteenth-century local leadership and the nature of its power: first, that urban elites aped and importantly resembled their rural “old” squirearchical counterparts in both substance and style; second, in so doing, such elites were calling up (whether intentionally or not) rural patterns of behavior to try to resolve problems of order, authority, legitimacy, and power in a situation where they did not naturally have easy and economical access to the means of producing any of these things. With this in mind, and after some preliminary clarification of terminology, the article will divide into three broad sections. In the first, it explores the utility of the squirearchical model to understanding the character and power of urban elites in the period up to around 1880 when local leadership in many industrial towns seemed most generously endowed with attributes to which the model might apply. The not very astonishing conclusion will be that the model is helpful in some ways, less so in others, all of which stem from the urban and industrial context in which leaders were operating. The second section will focus on the years up to around 1918 when “men (and women) of property and station” were withdrawing from active participation in the urban and industrial scene. Here, the argument will be that, at least in those northern towns under particular scrutiny, elements of the “new squirearchical” style proved remarkably resilient in spite of the withdrawal of many of those who practiced it—and may well have much to say about how the transition from one sort of leadership to another was managed, or at least took place. The final section will be concerned with the consequences of withdrawal for the power of urban leaders who remained. It will suggest that, just as property and station was no more than a partial predictor of power in the period when it was most abundantly in evidence, so its decline after 1880 was only one among many factors explaining what happened to the ability of local leaders to achieve intended effects. In fact, for various reasons, again heavily connected with the urban context in which leadership was exercised, the power at least of local political leaders in important respects increased.

In 1974 Professor Marc Schwarz published a review article on the historical reputation of King James I, in which he pointed out that that reputation had considerably improved in recent years. The slobbering pedant, lazy, conceited, cowardly, alcoholic, spendthrift, fancying pretty young men and giving them far too much influence in court and council: the lineaments of this caricature, first drawn by that foul-mouthed discharged officeholder Anthony Weldon, have not altogether vanished. But as historians have examined various aspects of the king's reign, reread the sources un-blinkered by the biases and assumptions characteristic of the Victorians and perpetuated in this century, from their widely varying points of view, by the disciples of Gloriana and of Karl Marx, a different view of King James has begun to emerge. The new picture of the king is that of a seeker of the via media at home and of peace abroad, a man with acute political antennae whose style was anything but confrontational and whose success in achieving that via media, and in keeping the peace, was comparable to that of his much-admired predecessor. Typical of the converts is Professor J.P. Kenyon, who in 1958 adopted the traditional view of James in his collection of essays on the Stuart kings, but who twenty years later described him as “a strange medley of opposites: he was a fool in some sense, but in others a great man.”

Professor Schwarz's analysis of the recent literature dealt in some detail with four areas: the king's policy toward the church and especially toward the Puritans; foreign affairs; James's views of the constitution and his relations with parliament; and his rule in Scotland. On some other matters there had been no attempt to defend the king: his disastrous economic and fiscal policies, including the inflation of honors, and his predilection for favorites like Somerset and Buckingham. In a number of these areas the work of the past ten years has done nothing to alter Schwarz's verdicts. No significant new work on foreign policy has appeared save in connection with other matters, to be discussed below; the era awaits its R.B. Wernham. There has been no attempt to defend James's irresponsible attitude toward money, which was by far his worst failing as a king, and there is reason to suppose that his financial reputation is irredeemable. It might be pointed out, however, that the Jacobean age was a postwar era, a period of relaxation after the long period of domestic and foreign tension which began when Henry VIII decided to put aside his wife.

Several recent studies dealing with the English church during the Norman period add immeasurably to our understanding of the era, but nonetheless represent a lost opportunity to recreate the actual ecclesiastical milieu, an English church unsevered from its Norman counterpart. Institutional differences surely existed between the two churches, yet much is lost in treating them separately. Indeed, few historians would attempt to study the great eleventh and twelfth-century cathedrals and abbey churches in England detached from those in Normandy. It is therefore the purpose of this paper to examine the customs, ideas, and especially the individuals which the two churches shared.

A concerted effort to reexamine political institutions as they once functioned, rather than as a necessary condition for the states which they later became, has already begun. In 1976 John Le Patourel produced an impressive synthesis, The Norman Empire, and asserted that following the Norman Conquest, England and Normandy formed one dominion. It was united by a ruler who was at the same time King of the English and Duke of the Normans, and by a baronial class which had extensive holdings on both sides of the Channel. This supposedly came to an end in 1144 when Geoffrey of Anjou conquered Normandy. A recent review of the The Norman Empire, which like most reviews speaks of its sterling qualities, nevertheless points out that the sections dealing with the church are, “not given much space … (and) are probably the most derivative in the book.”

Walter Bagehot divided the English constitution into two parts, the “dignified” and the “efficient.” The sovereign and the House of Lords were the dignified or the showy parts, imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress an uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the real work went on, where men of business transacted affairs of state using the authority obtained by the dignified parts. So he wrote in the years preceding the second Reform Bill, when it was conventional to speak of the rudeness and unruliness of an uneducated people and of the hazards of admitting them to the franchise. Yet his book, animated in such large measure by the debates on parliamentary reform of the late 1860s, remains a much-quoted authority on the English constitution today.

Perhaps one among the reasons for its enduring popularity is that he expressed so neatly a notion that certainly existed before as well as in his time and that survives today, namely, that governmental activity can be divided into ceremonial and political parts. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion is to reality, as artifice is to plain speaking. In affairs of state, the adjective “ceremonial,” when attached to words like “head of state” or “official,” has come to mean empty figurehead or powerless placeholder. Ceremonies of state—coronations, jubilees, openings of Parliament—are picturesque and pleasant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything powerful other than that which is powerfully sentimental, colorful, and evocative.

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.

The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.

During 1661 and 1662 Scotland experienced one of the largest witch hunts in its history. Within the space of sixteen months no fewer than 660 persons were publicly accused of various acts of sorcery and diabolism. The hunt began to the east of Edinburgh in the villages and small burghs of Midlothian and East Lothian, where 206 individuals were named as witches between April and December 1661. The hunt did not remain restricted to that area, however, as the privy council busily issued commissions to local authorities throughout the country to try suspected witches. We do not know how many people were executed during the hunt, but the report of John Ray, the English naturalist, that 120 were believed to have been burned during his visit to Scotland suggests that the total number was substantial. It is true that some of the witches tried in the justiciary court (the central Scottish criminal court, also known as the justice court) were acquitted, and a number of those who were simply named as accomplices never actually came to trial. This should in no way, however, detract from the size and importance of the hunt. At no other time in Scottish history, with the possible exception of 1597, were so many people accused of witchcraft within such a brief period of time. Indeed, the hunt, which involved four times the number of persons accused of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, was comparable to the large witch hunts that occurred on the European continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Historians differ widely in appreciating the fiscal grievances of the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Following the Dodds, some dismiss them as a marginal concern, while others regard them as a major cause of revolt. No matter where they stand, historians have handled these grievances without careful analysis. This seems to stem from a debate that has dogged both rebellions. The complexity of the rebels' complaint is obscured by a simplistic desire to show that the revolts were primarily of religious provenance, notwithstanding the variety of causes evident in the rebels' demands. Furthermore, the two main advocates of secular motivation, A. G. Dickens and R. R. Reid, perversely mention the fiscal grievances only in passing. Yet they were there, firmly declared in the rebels' bills, petitions, and songs. A pervasive force affecting the whole range of society, they sustained the rebel view that the government had to be checked not only to prevent the subversion of the Church but also the decay of the commonwealth. They were also present in the revolts of 1537 as northerners rose again, this time to protest against a breach of promise committed by the government's attempt to collect the lay subsidy and clerical tenth before the York Parliament had met to determine whether or not they should be collected.

Most of Disraeli's recent biographers have drawn attention to the anti-Semitism which he experienced as a schoolboy and as an aspiring politician at the raucous free-for-all of the early Victorian hustings. But the barrage of anti-Semitism directed at him when he was prime minister between 1874 and 1880 has not received the same scholarly attention. Lord Blake, for example, in a work of almost 800 pages, devotes only three short sentences to the anti-Semitism of this period. To some degree it is easy to see why this is so. Although Disraeli was baptized into Christianity just before he turned thirteen, he was so harangued and ridiculed as a Jew during his early election campaigns that the anti-Semitic mood of the public could not be ignored, either by contemporary observers or by historians. The anti-Semitism he faced as prime minister, however, was not literally thrust in his face, and it did not intrude on his public appearances. It is perhaps understandable then that historians, contemplating the marked contrast between the vigorous Jew baiting of Disraeli's early elections and the absence of it in his later ones, would assume that, whatever prejudices might lurk in private diaries, letters, and memoirs, expressions of anti-Semitism in that most public of all arenas, the world of politics, were now unacceptable. Increasing political decorum, the triumph of liberal and nonconformist ideologies, the Emancipation of the Jews in 1858, their continuing acculturation and assimilation, their greater role in public life, and of course Disraeli's own prominence as leader of the “national” party combined, it might be argued, to create a political and social climate in which public expressions of anti-Semitism were neither profitable nor respectable.

“Social Darwinism” means almost as many things as there are people who have written on it; but this paper takes it to be a generic term for theories of human social development and maintenance which are in some way inspired by biological evolutionary theories—this “inspiration” could take the form of seeing human sociality as a straight extension of the animal (and perhaps plant) domain, or it could involve some sort of analogy. In discussion of the roots of social Darwinism two names invariably appear—that of Charles Darwin himself, obviously, and that of Herbert Spencer. Here, however is the end of agreement. Who was the more important and influential, divides scholars right down the middle; as also do the questions of who really came first and whether their doctrines were essentially the same.

Because there is so much disagreement, no one has yet adequately argued to precisely the right conclusion. To anticipate, this paper argues that both Darwin and Spencer represent fundamental advances (or, less normatively, shifts beyond) their common major source, Thomas Robert Malthus; and that although there was overlap (and undoubted mutual borrowing) their positions were fundamentally dissimilar. Consequently, a search for the roots of Social Darwinism yields two sources, Darwin and Spencer respectively, and that what came from these sources was different. This essay begins with a brief discussion of Malthus's views, paying special attention to his relevance to social Darwinian lines of thought, considers the views of Spencer and Darwin on human social structures, and concludes by comparing the two thinkers, noting their similarities, but arguing that these are far outweighed by their differences.