The theological position of the anonymous female author of Eliza’s Babes: Or The Virgin’s Offering (1652) is yet to be established with any certainty. This essay intends to go some way towards clarifying this point by analysis of her text in relation to various doctrinal options available to her in the contemporary religious climate. A brief introduction to this little-studied book precedes a preliminary sketch of the author’s beliefs drawn from internal evidence. The sketch will serve as a starting point from which to proceed to analysis of three particularly interesting passages in Eliza’s Babes: the poem, “To a Friend for her Naked Breasts” (p. 56); the prose meditation, “On ECCLES. 9.7. Goe eat thy bread with joy, &c” (pp. 80-84); and the poem, “My Descent” (pp.45-46).

The licentious career of Caroline of Brunswick, the most notorious queen in modern British history, was only exceeded by that of her husband, George IV, and the scandal that emerged when he attempted to obtain a divorce inspired one of the most unusual episodes of nineteenth-century British history. For six months the attention of the country was focused on the queen's trial; massive demonstrations in her support were familiar sights in London streets and news of the matter dominated the columns of the press. The popular outpouring of support for the queen often took the form of reviling the king and his ministers, and revolution seemed to be in the air, yet because no lasting political change resulted from this tumult, historians have tended to dismiss the affair as relatively unimportant. However, to view this interlude primarily in terms of party politics is to overlook the fact that the majority of the people who formed the massive crowds that so alarmed the government were neither radicals nor reformers, and many, if not most of them were unenfranchised. In order to better understand the implications of this unrest, it is important to identify those factors that inspired British men and women to openly denigrate their ruler and to heap opprobrium on the members of government in defense of a woman who, ironically, many believed to be guilty as charged. Such an examination makes it clear that this was an event of profound cultural significance and was in some respects the first wide-spread popular expression of the moral standards that have come to be labelled “Victorian.”

Any attempt to judge “public opinion” is fraught with difficulty. Most of the surviving journals, memoirs, and collections of letters from this period were written by members of the gentry and aristocracy; most of the middle and working-class people who actively demonstrated in support of the queen or who signed the numerous addresses sent to her have tended to remain silent and anonymous. Newspaper and other written accounts of the affair were often extremely partisan, for British society was sharply divided on this issue. Political caricatures, however, overcome some of these difficulties.

In recent years scholars have paid considerable attention to the problem of British identity and “Britishness.” Britishness and, for that matter, Englishness or Scottishness, are all, of course, impossible to quantify in any exact manner. While regional identities obviously persisted after 1707, this persistence did not preclude the construction of a national identity, a core set of “British” values that most people in Britain could agree represented them and their success as a commercial, industrial, and imperial power. In the press, popular fiction, and political dialogue, “British” was understood to stand for certain qualities, among them earnestness, prosperity, manliness, freedom, character, and civilization. These were the qualities used to contrast, compare, and find Britain superior to almost every nation and people in the world, especially Ireland and the British colonies.

This contrast has been central to scholarship on British identity, most notably Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Playing on Benedict Anderson's idea of an “imagined community,” Colley portrays Britain as an invented nation brought together primarily by confrontation with the French Catholic Other over the course of a century of near perpetual warfare. Britons came to define themselves as a single people “not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.” While a number of works seeking to modify, challenge, or even refute Colley have followed, most scholars concur that Englishness (or Britishness) was based above all on comparison with others, especially the Catholic French.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary in late October 1956 resulted in the exodus of approximately two hundred thousand Hungarians, of whom approximately twenty-one thousand came to Britain within a matter of weeks. This article historicizes the process of reception and resettlement of Hungarian refugees in Britain. Through exploring the rhetoric used and attitudes displayed during the reception and resettlement process, it considers if and how legally recognized rights established for refugees under the 1951 UN Convention mediated their arrival and treatment. It finds a failure of a new discourse of rights to permeate the language surrounding their reception. Instead, well-worn tropes of the generosity of the British and their traditions of tolerance and hospitality were deployed consistently at national and local levels. This had the effect of implying that entry to Britain was a privilege and one not to be abused, and it marginalized refugees who failed to conform to particular expectations. The article argues that tying attitudes toward Hungarian refugees—variously positioned as “grateful” or “ungrateful”—can be usefully understood within the context of broader conceptions of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor and their relationship with the (welfare) state. Consequently, along with exploring the experiences of reception and resettlement of Hungarians in 1956/7 the article contributes to understandings of behavior, rights, and welfare in postwar Britain.

This article offers a history of British alternative comedy as a case study of political challenge and opposition in the 1980s and considers the role of humor in political campaigning more broadly. It explores left-wing thinking on culture as a potential political weapon, and questions how this informed the development and impact of alternative comedy as a genre. The article observes that pioneering alternative comedians went some way to change British comedy values and inform political discussions. However, it also argues that the complex operation of jokes and the tendency of comedians to become “incorporated” within the political and cultural mainstream ensured that the impacts of radical alternative material were limited and ambiguous. It contends that the practice of alternative comedy was undermined by business and political values that were often influenced by Thatcherism, and that alternative comedians mostly failed to capture the imaginations of working-class Britons. These communities retained instead an affection for more traditional, differently rebellious, comedic voices. Ultimately, this article frames alternative comedy within a longer history of radical humor, drawing out broader lessons concerning the revolutionary potential of jokes and the relationship between comedians, their audiences, and politics.

The debates of the Army Council held at Putney church during October and November 1647 have not suffered neglect at the hands of historians and political theorists. Such an explicit examination of the fundamental tenets of government as occurred in the discussion of the franchise is a pivotal event in the history of political thought and it has been treated as such ever since Sir Charles Firth uncovered William Clarke's notes of the meetings. Emphasis upon the content of the dispute over the franchise has served to elevate the Putney debates into a symbolic event, a milestone in the struggle between privilege and liberty which dominated English history for two and a half centuries and English historiography ever since. Rainsborough's dictum that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he” encapsulates this theme and has passed into the common stock of historical quotations. Indisputably, succeeding generations of scholars and students will grapple with the meaning of the debate on the franchise and of its place in English political thought.

The universal importance that the conflict over the franchise has assumed for political theorists and historians of the longue durée has created some difficulties for students of événement who need to understand the precise historical situation in which the meetings occurred. When abstracted the debates may have sharp contours and poetic proportions; but when viewed more narrowly they take on different, and occasionally changing, shapes.

This article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.

Despite the growing interest in recent years in taking a British approach to the problems of the first half of the seventeenth century, Restoration historians have been slow to follow the trend. Instead, the historiographical traditions for Charles II's and James II's three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland have remained largely independent; rather than coming closer together, if anything they seem to be growing further apart. We see this in particular with the historiographies of the Glorious Revolution in Scotland and England, which have become curiously “out of sync.” It used to be the case that the Revolution in England was seen as a most unrevolutionary affair, a bloodless palace coup brought about as much by the Tories as the Whigs; by this account, James was not overthrown for breaking his contract with the people, but was regarded as having abdicated, and the framers of the Revolution settlement simply sought to vindicate ancient rights and liberties (as they put it in the Declaration of Rights), rather than assert any new constitutional principles. If the Revolution in England tended to be seen in a conservative, perhaps even Tory context, the radical, Whig revolution was still to be found, but north of the border, in Scotland. For it was in Scotland where the Whigs were unequivocally the architects, where James was seen as having forfeited his crown by his arbitrary and tyrannical style of government, and where a truly revolutionary settlement in church and state was established.

The occasional conformity controversy has been the subject of considerable study by historians, both contemporary and modern. However, recent research has tended to concentrate on the parliamentary and electoral aspects of the issue, with somewhat less attention given to its importance as an ideological question. Nevertheless, the latter aspect of the controversy is well worth examining, for aside from its impact upon the struggle for office and power, occasional conformity was also the subject of heated debate on the theoretical and philosophical level. And although this debate often degenerated into partisan diatribes and rhetoric, it also raised questions that transcended the political ploy on the one hand, and the theologian's quibble and the propagandist's stalking horse on the other. The arguments used by both sides during the controversy revealed the basic philosophical differences that lay at the heart of the rivalry between the Whig and Tory parties. Occasional conformity's role as an expression of, and its relation to, this struggle is the subject of this article.

The ideological debate over occasional conformity was necessarily stimulated by the parliamentary struggles during the first decade of the eighteenth century over the various bills which were designed to discourage the practice, and many of the tracts on the subject were written in response to these and other political maneuvers. But the pamphlet war had its own distinct existence, and the writers involved fought with their pens a battle that was parallel to the one that the politicians were fighting with votes and influence.

The years between 1667 and 1673 marked a crisis in the English Restoration. This crisis was produced by parliamentary consideration of an act to replace the expiring Conventicle Act of 1664. Hoping for relief from the provisions of the first act, dissenters in London and elsewhere were described by late 1667 as “mighty high and…expect[ing] to have their day now soon.” But having briefly experienced de facto religious freedom, the English nonconformists met with disappointment in 1670 when parliament adopted a second Conventicle Act. The act of 1670 reaffirmed the settlement of religion in an established Church protected by a coercive and persecuting state. Indeed, it offered the Church even greater security than the act of 1664. It provided for the distraint of the goods of those convicted of attending conventicles, and it established fines for justices and magistrates who failed to carry out its provisions. In renewing the policy of persecution, parliament also repudiated arguments made in public and in the prints, since the fall of the Earl of Clarendon, for such other ecclesiastical options as comprehension, toleration, and indulgence. The result of parliament's decision was a crisis—a period of confrontation, throughout the country, between the defenders of conscience and many magistrates charged with the enforcement of religious policy.

From its very foundation, most observers considered the ideas that motivated the British Labour Party to have been essentially empirical. As early as 1929 the German social democrat Egon Wertheimer famously remarked that, unlike his own party, Labour was “completely unencumbered by philosophy, theory and general views of life.” Over sixty years later, this opinion was endorsed by an academic survey of European social democracy that concluded that the party possessed a uniquely “practical brand of ideology.” Labour's apparent peculiarity is conventionally explained with reference to its historic role as the political arm of the British trade union movement and the privileged place held by members of the organized working class within party institutions. This intimate association supposedly gave rise to “Labourism,” characterized by many as a myopic preoccupation with the defense of male industrial workers' material interests. Labour's strong union link is also thought to have promoted a dominant “ethos” that directly reflected the proletarian experience of exploitation. Only in the 1970s, after many working-class members had left and been replaced by more bourgeois and marxist-inclined recruits, did scholars suppose that Labour became, albeit temporarily, more overtly doctrinaire.

In challenging this entrenched view of Labour thought, the present article focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which began with the lifting of the last vestiges of wartime austerity and ended just before the onset of a world recession. These years have now assumed the glow of, as Eric Hobsbawm has put it, “a sort of Golden Age.”

Debate over the nature of central-local relationships has played an important part in recent discussion of the origins and course of the English Civil War. It is an oversimplification, but not a caricature, to say that two distinct sets of views are current. The first, and in many ways the most consistent and coherent, arguments are those found in the work of the local historians who have developed the idea of the county community as the most important focus for the activities of the provincial gentry and, in more general form, in Morrill's The Revolt of the Provinces and Hutton's The Royalist War Effort. In this work a clear separation is seen between local and national issues or preoccupations. The majority of the county gentry, and still more the ranks below them, were ill informed about national developments and concerned with the activities of central government mainly as they affected the stability of their local communities. Only a small minority of activists were genuinely committed to the Royalist or the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War; the most characteristic provincial response to the divisions of 1642 was reluctance to become involved, as shown both in widespread neutralism among individuals and in collective attempts at local pacification. Gradually the whole of England was drawn, willy-nilly, into the war, but allegiance was determined largely by contingent military factors: the proximity of London or of the king's army or the relative effectiveness of the small numbers of local partisans.

When we were a little tiny colony of Britain
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
Our feckless history began to be written
(And the waves break busily night and day).
When first we fought in an Empire's cause
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
It wasn't for the loot, nor yet for the applause
(And the waves break busily night and day).
Then when we came to Dominion Status
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
Nor slump nor squeeze could alienate us
(And the waves break busily night and day).

These are lines in which Allen Curnow, New Zealand's most important living poet, responded in his secondary capacity, as Whim Wham, a weekly contributor of comic verse to newspapers, to the decision of Great Britain to seek entry to the European Community. He could see as everyone could that this would mean a dissolution of Britain's role in a global community and, in particular, of a relationship with Britain that had hitherto given meanings good and bad to New Zealand's history, its sense of itself, and the meaning of its existence.

Sir, have you thought what it's like to be
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)
All, all alone on a wide, wide sea?
(And the waves break busily night and day).
Much can happen in a very short time
(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves).
A feckless history, a foolish rhyme!
(And the waves break busily, night and day).