Robert Curthose, the eldest son of William I Duke of Normandy and King of England, received many blows of ill fortune during his long life (1051-1134). Most damaging to his image was his inability to emulate his father by conquering England after the great king's death in 1087, and again, after William Rufus's death in 1100. He attempted twice to restore the unity of the two lands, and twice he failed. Moreover, Robert's reign in Normandy was characterized by baronial feuds, civil war, lawlessness, and decentralization of authority, and his policies appeared “weak and blundering”. He enjoyed one glittering period of distinction: during the First Crusade (c. 1096-1100) he proved himself a brave and spirited participant. But upon his return to Normandy, insufficient baronial support and territorial control led in 1106 to his final degradation—the loss of his patrimony, the duchy of Normandy, and his permanent imprisonment at the hands of his younger brother, Henry I. Henry owed his victory, in large measure, to the fact that by 1106 most of Curthose's earlier companions had deserted him.

These almost unmitigated failures affected the loyalty of Curthose's companions in adverse ways. As will be shown, factors that frequently influenced political alliances in the Anglo-Norman world—long association, genuine fondness, a need to be on the winning side, and outside pressures—were, in Curthose's entourage, overshadowed by the desire for new acquisitions and the security of landed possessions. Because the duke was unable to safeguard and advance these primary interests, his power base was insecure and his retinue was characterized by shifting membership and short-term loyalty.

English landed society after the Restoration, and especially after the Glorious Revolution, has an historical reputation for stability, and even if this has sometimes been exaggerated by those who have commented upon it, it is clearly merited if comparison is made with the century before 1640. Possession of a great estate undoubtedly gave the aristocratic families of the age a massive economic strength, and the period is generally portrayed as one in which the ownership of property tended to pass increasingly into their hands. So perhaps it did, although any measurement is not, and may never be, possible. Yet it is certain that there remained an extremely active land market, and no contemporary observers of the land market whose correspondence has yet been studied ever complained that there was any shortage of property for sale. Moreover an examination of the title deeds of any estate built up at this time will reveal that the supply of land for sale came not only from the lesser squires and yeoman farmers, to whom the economic climate and fiscal exactions of much of this period were notoriously unkind, nor yet only from town dwellers who had inherited country estates in which they had no real interest. The substantial gentry and great landed magnates, too, are frequently found selling land, often in very considerable quantities. It is not the intention of this article to argue that, contrary to all other appearance, this is evidence that in any sense the greater proprietors were a “declining” class, for clearly they were not.

John Evans, Moderation Stated, 1682.

The ironic fate of Absalom and Achitophel is to be fully appreciated as one of the great political poems of the language and only partially comprehended as political argument. Recent criticism of the poem is marked by a widening discrepancy between the ways in which it is understood as verbal and as political artifact. Metaphor and allusion have been carefully and often subtly charted, yet the poem's political rhetoric and its political argument are assumed to be simple coordinates. The tensions, indeed the contradictions, between explicit language and implicit argument are not only unexamined but largely unperceived. The conventional reading, which has become an almost fixed critical response, argues that the poem rises above partisan politics, that it derives from a political intelligence committed to a conservative ideology but indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, the “party color'd mind.”

Generalities about Dryden's temper, the poet as philosophical sceptic, as disinterested critic of extremes, together with the seemingly ingenuous and repeated claims of moderation and balance in the Preface have led a number of critics to understand the narrator's espoused moderation as Dryden's political stance—a judgment which Dryden's contemporaries certainly did not allow.

The tradition of English verse panegyric began in the reign of James I when the accession of the Stuart line called “for a formal and specific expression of the subject's allegiance and of the values which commend it.” First adapted from Latin models by Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson, panegyric verse combined praise of the new monarch with conciliatory rhetoric aimed at uniting the king with his subjects. Still regarded as a branch of classical oratory at the beginning of James I's reign, verse panegyric underwent important transformations in succeeding decades. While Abraham Cowley adapted the panegyric themes of national revival and monarchic restraint to his version of the Pindaric ode, Edmund Waller and John Dryden made it a “branch of epic” by depicting the king as an epic hero. Thus enshrined among the neo-classical poetic genres, panegyric verse remained both a potent form of propaganda and an outlet for traditional literary aspirations through the reign of James II.

Following the constitutional upheavals of 1688, however, panegyric began to lose its traditional ceremonial function, and in following years the great Tory satirists made the decadence of panegyric conventions an object of their ridicule. Nevertheless verse panegyric did not immediately lose its credibility as literature or its efficacy as propaganda. Writing poems of public praise and celebration remained one way for the loyalists of a new regime—and for others who longed for restoration of the old—to articulate political sentiments, respond to the obligations of political patronage, and fulfill ambitions to write heroic verse.

In June, 1829 Ralph Wardlaw, Scotland's leading Congregationalist, wrote to his American friend, Leonard Woods of Andover, explaining the current fascination of America for British Dissenters. “An important experiment is going on there …, “ he noted, “of what Christianity when fairly excited can effect by her own native energies in the support and propagation of her cause, independently of the aids of civil power. I look to it … with high expectation, as I think it of vast consequence that a new practical manifestation of this should be given to the world.” Wardlaw was writing at the beginning of the Jacksonian era in America, a period when Nonconformists inspected American religion with a concentration never again quite equalled. For this scrutiny there were reasons beyond the general fascination with republican novelties. The emergence of a more vital and politically assertive Nonconformity, the eruption of voluntaristic controversy in both England and Scotland, the excitement of the Reform Age, and the perennial anticipation of revivals at home on the scale of the American awakenings all played roles in directing British attention overseas. And as Wardlaw indicated, the element of “American Protestantism” which most intrigued British evangelicals was the apparent vindication of the voluntary system, which with the accompanying phenomenon of revivals raised the prospect of a free spiritual and vital Christianity, indeed a new age in Christian history.

Despite its prominence in the literature of the 1830s, this British examination of the American voluntary church has received only scant attention from scholars.

The concept of the deferential society appears superficially to provide a valuable sociological underpinning to the phenomenon of the continuing dominance of the landed classes in nineteenth-century English politics. According to Professor D.C. Moore, whose case is advanced most fully in The Politics of Deference (1976), rural society consisted largely of a network of hierarchically structured communities. These, “what might be called ‘deference communities’ or ‘deference networks,’ (were) the essential action groups of mid-nineteenth century English politics.” Their nature and interaction “helps to explain the perpetuation of this structure (the deferential society), the perpetuation of the related political system, and the peculiar selection and formulation of political issues within the system.” It is difficult to do Professor Moore's subtle reasoning justice in a limited space but it would probably be fair to say that he sees most of the major legislative changes of the mid-nineteenth century as shaped and conditioned by the response of deferential leaders to social and economic change, a response which was designed as much to protect and buttress the existing system as to accommodate the new disruptive forces by major concession.

Professor Moore's case depends to a considerable extent on the pervasiveness and dominance of his “deferential communities” in rural society. However, while their existence is undeniable, other historians have expressed reservations as to the emphasis put on their role. Put most simply, in the words of Professor Moore's severest critic, “the electoral history of nineteenth-century Britain cannot be deduced from Bateman's Great Landowners.”

Although party was a considerably more limited force in the British political system between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Second Reform Act than it had been either during the thirties and early forties or in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was nonetheless a significant fact of English political life throughout the Victorian period. Few students of nineteenth-century British politics, however, would look to J.S. Mill, perhaps the most influential political thinker of his time, for insights into the role of party. The consensus has been that very little of a positive nature can be said about Mill and party. In The Elements of Politics, Henry Sidgwick observes that “Mill… hardly seems to contemplate a dual organisation of parties as a normal feature of representative institutions.” A.H. Birch asserts, in his Representative and Responsible Government, that Mill “simply ignored the existence of political parties.” Dennis Thompson's study of the structure of Mill's political thought devotes some three pages to Mill's attitude towards party government, the author concluding that he was hostile to it and did not consider it necessary “for effective, stable democracy.” Indeed, Mill's major political treatise, Considerations on Representative Government, says remarkably little about parties, and where they are referred to no constructive influence is imputed to them. His discussion of Thomas Hare's plan of personal or proportional representation, for example, makes clear that one of its numerous virtues is the security it provides for insuring the representation not of “two great parties alone” but of every significant “minority in the whole nation.”