How subversively anticlerical was late medieval Catholic reform in England? Were Elisabeth Sampson or perhaps John Wyclif the reformer or malcontent at hand, one might expect scholars rapidly to identify reform with subversion. But if John Colet's name is dropped in the conversation, “reform” will generally take on a different meaning. Son of one of London's most popular mayors, Colet was a pluralist who progressed along the familiar and painstakingly protracted route to the doctorate of theology during the final decade of the fifteenth and the first of the sixteenth century. Along the way he struck up close and lasting friendships with Erasmus, Thomas More, and William Warham. To the last of these, he probably owed his appointment in 1504 as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London where he served until his death in 1519.

Primarily because of the Reformation, political obedience became an increasingly significant issue in Tudor England. The success of Henry VIII's break with Rome resulted partly because the state could use the established church to inculcate in the populace the notion of loyalty to the civil government as a Christian duty. Despite the vacillations of Henrician ecclesiastical policy and the more radical reforming spirit of the Edwardian years, Protestant views on political obedience remained fundamentally stable. The accession of Mary, however, created a critical dilemma for men who had been stressing the duty of obedience to one's ruler. Exile was only a partial solution, though among the exiles a handful of leaders worked out a theory of tyrannicide. Of those who took this course, John Knox in particular confused the issue by simultaneously raising the thorny problem of gynecocracy. Written while Mary Tudor was queen, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women appeared after Elizabeth's accession, when it was an embarrassment to Protestants. It was left, then, to the Elizabethans to rethink the entire question of political obedience.

In her biographical note on John Ponet, C. H. Garrett observed that although there was “little good” to be said of him as a man, as a political pamphleteer Ponet had attracted less attention than was his due. Although W. S. Hudson and W. Gordon Zeeveld have remedied this deficiency to a considerable extent, the precise connections between Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power and the contemporary situation in England have not been delineated. Much of the strength of this work lies in the fact that it was written as a direct response to events in England and on the Continent. In particular, Ponet's theories regarding the natural rights of subjects stemmed from efforts by the crown in 1555 to remove the right of ownership of private property from those it regarded as delinquents: the Protestant exiles. Ponet elevated the possession of property by private individuals to the status of a right. He went on to examine the basis of regal power and its practical limits and, in arguing the legitimacy of resistance to an unjust ruler, postulated a commonwealth in which a substantial measure of power rested with “the people”.

Between the accession of Charles I in 1625 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 Calvinism lost its hold over English religious life. The effect of Arminianism on this decline has yet to be fully understood. The impact of the early English Arminians, the circle of Archbishop Laud, is, to be sure, well known. Less appreciated is the emergence of an Arminian critique of Calvinism from within the culture of nonconformity. This “radical” or, preferably, “new” Arminianism was a phenomenon of the Cromwellian era, the 1640s and 1650s. By reconstructing the origins of the new Arminianism of its chief exponent, John Goodwin (1595-1666), this essay will try to demonstrate its pivotal place as a link between the Puritanism of the pre-civil war decades and the rational theology of the early English Enlightenment.

Much has been written about the fall of Robert Harley in 1708, little about the fall of the Godolphin ministry in 1710. Yet a comparison of the two events casts a flood of light upon the nature of politics in the reign of Queen Anne. This is especially true if the historian asks the question: why did Robert Harley succeed in 1710 where he failed in 1708? For succeed he assuredly did in 1710 and fail he certainly did in 1708. On the first occasion he suffered loss of office and humiliation; two years later he drove Godolphin and the Whigs from office bag and baggage.

William Pitt had no desire for a war with France in 1793. While the French had lurched from bankruptcy to revolution to war, he had kept England at peace for a decade and successfully repaired the damage done to government finance by the American War. Such had been Pitt's intention from the start, according to his Cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, who later wrote that “his views and measures…were in the outset purely oeconomical and pacific. It was his first ambition to restore by moderate and peaceful councils the strength and confidence of his country….” He had no desire to risk either the financial or political equilibrium he had achieved.

The tendency persists to separate the artful storyteller in Collins from the less successful thesis novelist. Like Wells and, to a lesser degree, Lawrence, Collins developed too strong a sense of mission. Beginning with Man and Wife, his novels seem encumbered with social protest. Collins's “old-fashioned” opinions, especially the remark that the “primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story,” are frequently quoted to reduce the skilful storyteller to a mere entertainer. Storytelling in The Woman in White is, of course, superb; but for once the novelist of sensation and suspense utilized his narrative skills to advance an idea important to himself and of consequence nationally: his conviction that the worship of propriety had become, by 1870, one of the besetting evils of Victorian life. In The Woman in White, Collins combines his talent for melodrama with just enough of the social critic, even if the Victorian eventually upstages the dissident moralist: the way things happen, the novelist argues, is ultimately determined not by propriety, man's law, but by providence, which may by God's.

Five weeks before the armistice in November 1918 an unprecedented thing happened in Britain. The control of a modern popular newspaper passed from private ownership into the hands of the prime minister of the day. Ever since David Lloyd George assumed the premiership twenty-two months earlier there were signs aplenty that relations between Downing Street and Fleet Street had entered a new era. But the sale of the Daily Chronicle to agents of the head of the government went far beyond custom or precedent. Lloyd George's immediate predecessors had remained old-fashioned even in the face of the press revolution wrought by the likes of Sir George Newnes and Alfred Harmsworth (immortalized as Lord Northcliffe). The phenomenon of mass-circulation newspapers had little appeal to great aristocrats like Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery, who were very selective in their dealings with Fleet Street. Likewise Herbert Henry Asquith scarcely troubled to hide his Balliol-bred contempt, ever preferring quality journalism to quantity, while Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman seems not to have exerted himself unduly to cultivate and exploit the good will of editors and proprietors.