The body of recent historical explorations of Englishness and Britishness can seem practically interminable. To some, this work is more a cause than a product of the dynamic underlying recent constitutional changes in the United Kingdom. Linda Colley, in particular, is singled out for vituperation by right-wing commentators for an alleged attempt to depict the United Kingdom as “an artificial creation, built from opposition to Frenchmen and Catholics and lacking any form of coherent cultural core,” thus preparing the ground for its wilful destruction by the Blair government. Yet others have suggested that Colley overstated the hegemony of the idea of Britishness among the nations of the United Kingdom. It is contended that British identity penetrated in England to a unique degree, a process which has produced long-term imbalance and instability in the United Kingdom. Tom Nairn thus blamed English arrogance for this instability. For other commentators the historical absence of a tangible demand for English self-government is to be problematized and regarded as an indication of “backwardness.” As Bernard Crick wrote: “England is the problem. Because English nationalism is suppressed and not explicit, it is soured, not wholly in control of its own reactions and is difficult to deal with by the other nations.”

The friction between civil and military authorities was never greater than during the Great War of 1914-1918. The unprecedented casualties suffered by the British Army and involvement of every element of British life in the conflagration gave added intensity to this conflict. The ability of British democracy to wage total war was put to a severe test. Where did the responsibility of the civilians end in formulating strategy? Where did the authority of the soldiers begin? This strategic debate largely centered on the size of Britain's commitment to the ghastly slaughter in the trenches of the Western Front.

Before 1914 British war planners had thought of a short war with at most only limited involvement in Europe. After Britain's plunge into war, the civil and military authorities decided to employ the small professional British Army on the continent to save France from being overrun, a decision made easier by the widespread belief that the war would be over within a few months. By this continental commitment Britain became involved in a long and bloody war of attrition in France and Flanders.

As 1914 ended in stalemate in the West with few of the original members of the British Expeditionary Force still on their feet the debate over the employment of future British armies began in earnest. The government's chief military adviser was Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War. Although the public viewed Kitchener as Britain's greatest soldier, his appointment was almost certainly a mistake.

The study of the nineteenth century British Parliament cannot be limited to the institution itself, nor to the constitutional relations of its par ts. The great electoral reforms of the century increased the importance of the electorate in political decision-making. Coupled with these changes, the vast transformations of economy and society altered the very functions of Parliament. Thus nineteenth century parliamentary history requires an understanding of the whole political system, as well as the events within the House. Many of the recent works bearing on the history of Parliament reflect these facts. While good narrative history of parliamentary events continues to be needed and produced, the most innovative recent work raises different kinds of problems entirely and is not limited to affairs at Westminster. The newer types of work can be viewed as coming in two waves: first, a detailed analysis of political structure, utilizing traditional kinds of sources; and second, a proliferation of analytical approaches, using new sources and methods. Both waves are basically analytical, but they differ in questions asked and in routes to the answers.

The analysis of political structure has been inspired by the questions, if not the methods and interpretations, of Sir Lewis Namier. The best of many examples are still Norman Gash's Politics in the Age of Peel and H. J. Hanham's Elections and Party Management. The main questions asked in such works are: What was the real, as opposed to the theoretical, framework of politics? How were politics actually conducted outside the House of Commons? How did the various reform acts affect the functioning of the electoral system? These works stress, in Gash' terminology, the “medium” in which the ordinary politician operated. In each case, they seem to emphasize continuity rather than change, and the enduring power of bribery, corruption, and influence. They have added a great deal to what the narratives tell us about Victorian politics, especially in regard to the realities of constituency operations, the origins and workings of party machinery, the problems of party finance, and the cost of elections. Structural investigations of parties, like Conor Cruise O'Brien's Parnell and His Party and E. J. Feuchtwanger's Disraeli, Democracy and the Tory Party have given a new dimension to party history. Perhaps most important, the structural studies have established the crucial significance of local factors and the comparative inconsequence of national issues in most elections.

One of the most bitter pamphlet wars of the later seventeenth century was fought between the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who by 1689 had perhaps fifty-thousand followers, and the Muggletonians, a tiny sect which probably had fewer than one-thousand members. Despite the difference in the number of their adherents, the Quakers believed that the dispute with the Muggletonians was so significant that George Fox, William Penn, Edward Burrough, Isaac Penington, and other Quaker leaders attacked the Muggletonians in print. The Muggletonian prophets, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, believed that the Quakers were the greatest enemies of true religion, and they produced a steady stream of anti-Quaker tracts. Some of the accusations on both sides, such as being Antichrist or being worse than the Pope, were common in sectarian arguments, but the conflict reached a sustained height of invective which was rare even in such a contentious age. In Fox's opinion, Muggleton was a “heathen” whose “foul breath … comes from the foul spirit of thy father.” Another Quaker, Thomas Loe, addressed Muggleton as “thou son of perdition and child of the Devil … seed of the serpent and old sorcerer … ignorant sot.” Quaker attacks on the Muggletonians culminated in Penn's assertion that “from the most primitive times there has not appeared … a more complete monster … than John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, brethren and associates in the blackest work that ever fallen men or angels could probably have set themselves upon.”

In the English civil war of King Stephen's reign combatants frequently damaged church property. Some of this damage was accidental or malicious, but most was due to military exigency; commanders often took advantage of the strategic location of church properties by fortifying, attacking, or robbing them, either to get at the enemy, to deny him sustenance, or to reward their own men. Chroniclers and other clerics angrily decried this plundering and damage of church possessions. Some wrote of whole years “being consumed with depredations and oppressions of churches …,” and the author of the Gesta Stephani accused the Anglo-Norman barons of having “greedily assailed the property … of the church, which was the wonted and common practice of them all … .” In a famous passage from his Policraticus, John of Salisbury cried out “Where are now Geoffrey, Miles, Ranulf, Alan, Simon [and] Gilbert, men who were not so much counts of the kingdom as public enemies?” These men, the earls of Essex, Hereford, Chester, Cornwall, Northampton, and Lincoln, all made John's list of evil-doers because of their actions against the church during the civil war. There were frequent reports of whole towns having been burned with all their churches, and clerics feared assault and robbery on the highways. Undoubtedly many such stories were exaggerated, but the fact remains that during Stephen's reign the English church suffered material damages on a scale unknown for many generations.

A fresh interpretation of King William III's employment of the royal veto provides new insights into the political and constitutional issues of his reign. The veto, or the crown's negative voice as it was called by contemporaries, is a particularly fruitful subject for study in charting the course of politics in seventeenth century England. The employment of the veto offers an accurate barometer for measuring political and constitutional change. It addresses the key issue of sovereignty—who makes law? King or Parliament? It is surprising, therefore, that historians have neglected to examine the implications of William's employment of the veto. As a result, their conclusions about the veto are not supported by a full analysis of the available evidence. What they have overlooked is that a close examination of the bills the king rejected, and of contemporary views of the royal prerogative, demonstrates that underneath the turmoil of Williamite politics lay a stable foundation built on the settlement achieved at the Revolution of 1688/9.

During his brief rule William III rejected a significant number of bills. Between 1692 and 1696 he vetoed five public bills: the Judges, Royal Mines, Triennial, Place, and MP Qualifications Bills. Previous Tudor and Stuart monarchs, with the exception of Queen Elizabeth I, only infrequently invoked the crown's right to refuse legislation. Queen Anne, who followed William to the throne, vetoed only one bill. She was the last monarch to employ this prerogative, although it remains theoretically a legitimate royal power.

Ecclesiastical benefactions by English barons have provided topics for a number of scholars, but the professional civil servants, proto-bureaucrats, who first appeared in the twelfth century, are another group whose gifts to the Church deserve more study. In England, such men appear as early as Henry I's time, but they become more numerous in the reign of his grandson, Henry II. At first, such royal servants were men of all work, doing whatever the king assigned to them at the curia regis, in the counties, and abroad. By the last years of Henry II and in the reigns of his sons, however, some specialization was taking place, and this becomes easier to see in Henry III's early years.

It is next to impossible to probe these royal administrators' minds. They left few letters, no personal recollections, and they earned only a few anecdotes—mainly hostile—in the chronicles. For a number of years, I have been studying a group of fifty-two of these men, whose careers span the last third of the twelfth and the first third of the thirteenth centuries, chosen first chiefly because of their connection with the work of royal justice. They form a representative sample, ranging in rank from the justiciar to knights of the counties, from archbishops to men in minor orders, including roughly equal numbers of clergy and laity. They range from close associates of the king to largely local officials (see Appendix I).

The elaborate pageantry and festivities of grand public processions have proven to be of great interest to historians writing on late medieval and early modern Europe. The more limited ceremonies and protocol at court have attracted somewhat less attention, although on occasion they have been adopted as evidence of a monarch's personal feelings about his attendants and family members. A study of royal protocol and the social and political framework in which rulers fulfilled their roles as sovereigns is timely, for it will surely lead to a new and fuller understanding of how monarchs's public roles, such as those of the Tudors, related to their private motivations.

Greeting ceremonies, which were one aspect of the “law of hospitality,” require special attention, because they offer insights into the interactions of people of varying status who were of fundamental importance to the hierarchical communities of Europe. As Esther Goody points out, “Greeting becomes a mode of entering upon or manipulating a relationship in order to achieve a specific result.” How monarchs privately greeted their brides, the topic of this essay, not only offers insights into the complexity of the relationship of individuals who were wed by proxy before they had become acquainted, but also offers evidence of how the greeting ritual performed by monarchs differed from that enacted by their royal and noble relatives.

In December 1905 R.B. Haldane, later Viscount Haldane of Cloan, became Secretary of State for War. Among his fellow politicians Haldane, at this time, was looked on as an intriguer who combined habitual meddling in high places with a curious and remarkable interest in German philosophy. The Prime Minister of the day, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had good reason to dislike Haldane, nicknamed him “Schopenhauer.” Both men knew that the War Office had ruined the reputations of several of Haldane's predecessors. “We shall now see,” remarked Campbell-Bannerman, in a phrase that later became famous, “how Schopenhauer gets on in the Kailyard.” Despite this unpromising start Haldane's military reforms were so successful that they established his reputation in history as one of the great servants of the state in the pre-1914 era. His work and accomplishments in the field of military aviation, however, have been criticized very severely. In fact, the matter is so complicated that one aviation authority has written of the record in this area that “Haldane's actions behind the scenes may never be known with certainty.”

Even some of his closest subordinates in the field of military aeronautics were very critical of Haldane's attitude and outlook. In February 1911 a major step was taken when, by an Army Order, a unit known as the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers was created. This Battalion was entrusted with the duty of training a “body of expert airmen.” The Battalion's first commander was Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, an officer who knew little about airplanes, but was instead a balloon expert with experience in the South African and Russo-Japanese wars.

Napoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico mystified some British observers. For many others, however, it raised urgent questions about the duties of European civilization and the future of global order. This article argues that the affair forced attitudes toward other European countries' overseas imperial projects into sharp political focus, and that in doing so it revealed incipient shifts in the center of gravity of Victorian liberalism. France's Second Mexican Empire split opinion in the Liberal Party and press, throwing light on wider disputes about the parameters of legitimate imperial intervention, the reach of the principles of nationality and self-determination, the political needs of disordered multiracial polities in less-developed parts of the world, and Europe's proper relations with Spanish America. But most Liberals who engaged with the enterprise condemned it, a fact that lays bare a changing balance of power between what historians have called “liberal imperial” and noninterventionist arguments in the 1860s. The failure of the intervention, moreover, did much to affirm powerful partisan narratives about French politics, which helped to buttress the electoral ascendancy of the Liberal Party.

This article recounts the legal proceedings against those Puritan activists who challenged the government of Charles I in the 1630s. It demonstrates that most of our knowledge of these events has come from the highly colored accounts written by the defendants themselves. Closer examination demonstrates that Leighton, Prynne, Bastwick, Burton, and Lilburne set out to challenge the government, first by writing incendiary tracts about religion and then by refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the courts into which they were brought. While they saw their causes as cases of conscience, Caroline officials saw them as attacks upon the legal and political system. They were convicted in formal legal proceedings, and while the penalties they received appear barbaric to our sensibilities, they were typical in such cases.

In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin's tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin's response is also included.