Various scholars have discussed, for particular elections, the court's role as an electoral patron. However, their work has, of necessity, left unanswered several significant questions about such patronage. It is clear that, by the elections of 1640, issues of a more “national” importance had a strong impact on the success or failure of the court's electioneering. But the questions remain. Were the elections of 1640 unique or can traces of such agitation over matters of more than local concern be found in earlier elections? And did the issues of early Stuart politics, religious reform, the alleged growth of recusant sympathies, the foreign policies followed by James I and Charles I, and the financial expedients practiced by Charles I, have any significant effect on the court's electoral influence? Perhaps, by reviewing the influence of the Lord Wardens of the Cinque Ports between 1604 and 1628, a few answers may be suggested and a clearer picture of the electoral practices of the court may emerge.

England's traditional bridge to Europe, the Cinque Ports — a misleading title since there were actually seven — held fast to their special privileges, their own unique organization, franchise and courts. They returned fourteen burgesses, or “barons” as they were uniquely called, to parliament. The Lord Warden, however, enjoyed considerable influence over them. He was Constable of Dover Castle, his administrative headquarters, and acted as a sheriff for the ports, which were outside county jurisdiction. More importantly, the Lord Warden was the voice of the Cinque Ports at court.

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.

This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.

Late eighteenth-century London was a center of political debate, expressed variously in countless pamphlets, in coffee house discussions, and in extra-parliamentary political organizations. Intellectuals and political activists who argued about the problems of ministerial corruption and relations with the colonies had great faith in the power of reasoned discourse and the development of knowledge to improve the human condition. Most of them were interested in science and religion as well as politics. They were part of that broad intellectual ferment that we call the Enlightenment; yet for all the originality of some of their ideas and the radicalism of their political thinking, they owed a great deal to longstanding English political and religious traditions. They were rationalists who believed in God, and radicals who believed in history.

Catharine Macaulay was one of these intellectuals; she was surely not a particularly original thinker, but was unique in using history as her primary medium of political debate, and in being a woman tolerated in male intellectual circles. Macaulay and her associates owed a great intellectual debt to earlier radical thinkers, the “commonwealthmen” of the seventeenth century. What is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which their ideas were informed by religious beliefs as well as political ideology. Beliefs in both the ancient rights of Englishmen and in millennial perfectionism provided the basis for the particular brand of political radicalism espoused by Macaulay and her associates. History was an important part of their political thinking, both because the rights of Englishmen were rooted in historical experience and because the process of history was part of the ultimate achievement of perfection.

Students of the industrial revolution now generally admit what seemed obvious to Samuel Garbett, the Birmingham manufacturer and lobbyist, two hundred years ago; namely, that the state was an important participant in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Many scholars still emphasize the restraint of English government — a restraint which gave relatively free play to natural economic forces and to individual genius, a restraint which also aggravated the social repercussions of so momentous a transformation. But they recognize that entrepreneurs could obtain legal sanction for enclosures, canals, and a myriad of other “improvements' easily and at moderate cost by means of a private act of parliament, and they debate whether existing patent law stimulated invention by providing adequate rewards for the inventor or aimed primarily at discouraging stultifying monopoly. Because the processes of growth in the last decades of the century were so fundamental and pervasive, fiscal, commercial, colonial, and foreign policies were bound to have an impact on the embryonic industrial economy. Whether government by its various acts encouraged or impeded growth is open to debate at a number of levels. There can be no doubt, however, that politicians endeavored, if sometimes slowly and haphazardly, to adapt policy and law to changing conditions and that their decisions did affect the tempo and quality of growth.

In 1819 Viscount Castlereagh, England's Foreign Secretary and perhaps the most hated member of the Government, complained in parliament that the journalist, T. J. Wooler (1786?-1853), had become “the fugleman of the Radicals.” His weekly journal The Black Dwarf was circulating from radical Westminster to northern colliery districts, where it could be found “in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you meet.”

Early nineteenth-century popular radicalism took form in its journalism and its political tracts, pamphlet satires, caricatures, posters, and ballads. The best of the radical publications were shaped in turn by traditional popular attitudes and forms, including the rich resources of popular humor. Wooler's writing was unmistakably political, and often earnest in the manner of the polemical journalism of William Cobbett and Richard Carlile or the oratory of Henry Hunt. But his favorite tone was satirical, and this made him prominent among those radicals who did the most in the late Regency years to promote a public attitude of anti-authoritarianism rather than deference, of contempt for an unjust government rather than fear of it. E. P. Thompson has shown that it was “not the solemnity but the delight” with which the radicals “baited authority” that made the old order vulnerable. Wooler's journalism is a fine example of the political uses of popular humor, and a key to understanding the distinctive character of Regency radical culture.

I

Regency radicalism was a mixture of traditional and Enlightenment political ideas of natural rights and freedoms and an emerging class-consciousness of economics and society.

The education of working-class children was a major governmental concern during the age of Peel and Cobden. In this period the state's financial commitment grew from £30,000 to £125,000, and a new department of state — the Education Committee of the Privy Council, with its bureaucratic establishment, the Education Department — was created to direct central policy. But who made that policy? Who guided education reform into channels which still, to some extent, contained the British educational establishment a century later? And does this example of Victorian reform suggest the dynamics of state intervention in other fields up to then left to private enterprise?

Civil servants, it has been alleged, were the responsible agents of change in this area. James Kay-Shuttleworth, the Education Department's first permanent secretary, has today a reputation as great as Chadwick's or Trevelyan's among historians. Henry Parris believes that he “organized” the department and made its policy; he calls his retirement in 1849 perhaps “the greatest single misfortune in the country's educational history.” David Roberts calls him “the chief architect of England's educational system;” he attributes to him all major government education policy between 1846 and 1849. That policy “came from the mind of a man who possessed not only a clear view of the ends which he wished to attain but also a sense of the possible means to those ends….” George Kitson Clark contended that his “services to public education have probably never been properly valued.”

W. E. Gladstone resigned twice as leader of the Liberal Party. His final retirement of 1894 has received much attention, but his resignation two decades earlier is not well known. At age sixty-five, the recent loser in a surprise general election, the former prime minister stepped down from the Liberal leadership in January, 1875. Some observers doubted the permanence of his retirement, but previous speculation about the Liberal succession had assumed that Gladstone could hope at most for one further premiership. After he regained the leadership in 1880 and soldiered on as the Grand Old Man at the head of three further governments, Liberal sympathizers dismissed his 1875 resignation in retrospect as an unrevealing mistake, a temporary meandering from the true path of his career.

Recent studies have pointed to the decisive importance of Gladstone's course in the 1870s, especially to the implications of his return to public life. R. T. Shannon ties Gladstone's resignation to his loss of rapport with the popular forces that had once rallied to the banners of Reform and Irish disestablishment. His government's rejection at the polls in 1874 seemed to end “his great romance with the people of England.” Bitter, disillusioned, and mystified about the popular verdict, he resigned his post as Liberal leader. Freed from parliamentary responsibilities, Gladstone went on, almost in spite of his conscious intentions, to capture the soul of popular Liberalism, beginning with his hesitant but inspiring participation in the 1876 agitation against the Bulgarian atrocities, a campaign which held few attractions for the official Liberal hierarchy.