SINCE the terms radical and radicalism were not in use before the nineteenth century, it may fairly be asked what they signify when applied to the mid-seventeenth century. The simplest answer is a pragmatic one: by radical I mean anyone advocating changes in state, church or society which would have gone beyond the official programme of the mainstream puritan-parliamentarians in the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly of Divines. In the Parliament I therefore exclude here the ‘political Independents’, alias the War Party, other than the handful of pre-1647–8 republicans. In the Assembly I exclude the ‘Five Dissenting Brethren’, who were the spokesmen of moderate Congregationalism, but outside it I include some religious Independents whose radicalism will be presently defined. To borrow another nineteenth-century figure of speech, if we look to the Left of the mainstream Puritans and Parliamentarians, what a bewildering profusion of groups and individuals appears. It is scarcely necessary to have studied the period at all to be familiar with the names of many such sects or movements, if not perhaps of all: Anabaptists, Antinomians, Behmenists, Brownists, Comenians, Diggers, Familists, Fifth-Monarchy Men, Grindletonians, Levellers, Mortalists, Muggletonians, Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, and Socinians. Yet simply to reel off such a list is to omit many interesting and remarkable groups and individuals: would-be reformers of the professions and of law, medicine and education, free-traders, agricultural improvers, philo-semites and proto-feminists, to mention only some of the most obvious. Any reader of Thomas Edwards' Gangraena and other contemporary commination or of Christopher Hill's The World Turned Upside Down and his other writings will be familiar with most of them and no doubt with others too.

In the last decade, as economic orthodoxy has shifted from a Keynesian–influenced study of demand towards the monetarist concern for the supply side in the economy, so history seems to have moved in the opposite direction. After many years studying the role of production and supply in the economic development of Britain, historians have belatedly turned their attention to demand, and have been discovering, or rediscovering, the history of consumption. The advent of consumerism in Britain has been positively identified by Joan Thirsk in the seventeenth century, and by Neil McKendrick in the eighteenth. Putting a date to the consumer revolution has become a highly competitive business; W. Hamish Fraser, and before him Peter Mathias, have identified just such a transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century, while Derek Aldcroft prefers to locate this change in the inter–war years.

During the past thirty years most historians have acknowledged that it is anachronistic to describe Louis XIV as an absolute monarch. Many of them have turned their attention towards the various elite groups whose power and privileges coexisted with those of the crown in the very different, and sometimes fiercely separatist, provinces which formed the kingdom of France. A few have attributed such great influence to local nobles and institutions that the royal government seems to have been reduced to impotence. This impression, clearly too extreme, has been created first by a preoccupation with those issues and periods where the crown was in conflict with many, or in the case of the Frondes with almost all, of its leading subjects, and a disregard for the more numerous occasions when the king and at least some élite groups had identical or compatible purposes. Secondly, it has arisen from a neglect of the informal channels of communication which were often more important than the formal administrative structure for linking the court and the provinces, and for conducting the everyday routine of government. The most important of these was the network of ‘brokers’, often influential governors and bishops, by which provincial requests for highly prized royal patronage—whether titles, orders, offices, privileges or pensions— were conveyed to the ministers and to the king himself. The possibility of personal advancement was a vital consideration for members of the upper social échelons as they calculated their responses to ministerial instructions and enquiries.

DURING the second quarter of the eighteenth century there were successive waves of public agitation over the spirits trade—in 1726, 1728–9, 1735–8 and again in 1748–51. Opponents of ‘Mother Gin’ and her supporters waged a multi-media propaganda war, through tracts and sermons, broadsides, ballads, satirical verse, petitions, posters and prints (though Hogarth's Gin Lane and Beer Street came only as a final, splendid coda to the attack on gin, in 1751). Parliament in this period enacted a series of measures to deal with the problem. The most dramatic and draconian of these was the 1736 Gin Act, whichwas hurried through Parliament in a few weeks and threatened to close down the spirits trade overnight. The Act, with secondary legislation in 1737 and 1738, caused such a landslide of protest and opposition in the capital that it had to be abandoned and later repealed. In this paper I want to concentrate on the 1736 Act, looking at its background and aftermath. As we shall see, the controversy raises important questions not only about the organisation of the drink trade and consumption patterns in the early eighteenth century, but also about the social and political processes of legislation–the activity of interest groups, the attitude of government, and the problems of enforcement.

ON 11 May 1641, Maurice Wynn reported that ‘some plott or other’ had been discovered to the Commons. The vagueness of his reaction seems to have been characteristic of much assessment of the army plot ever since. There is a general sense that there is enough smoke to make it probable that there is some fire, but we are not extremely clear who plotted with whom to do what. This is, in part, because of a very justifiable caution. It is felt that Charles I's plots, like his grandmother's lovers, are capable of growing in the telling, especially when the tellers are people to whom belief in popish conspiracy comes with eagerness distressing to a modern ear. Pym and Hampden's later readiness to exploit such mare's nests as the Beale plot at crucial moments in the debate on the Grand Remonstrance adds further to the wariness with which plot stories from the Long Parliament are treated. Wariness is an entirely justified reaction with any Long Parliament plot, but wariness may stop short of incredulity. Above all, a belief that plots should not be taken on trust is no substitute for an examination of the sources.

MATILDA'S epitaph, proclaiming her the daughter, wife and parent of a Henry, great by birth, greater in marriage, and greatest of all in her offspring, epitomises her standing among her contemporaries. It also explains some of the difficulty any historian must experience in attempting to penetrate her character and motives. Her role was seen essentially as an auxiliary one. The relatively few years when she played a leading part in English politics as ‘domina Anglorum’, with one very brief and ill-advised attempt to act as ‘regina Anglie’, years to which modern historians have devoted most of the pages they have allowed her, counted for virtually nothing in the summing up of her influence made in 1167. As a woman involved in politics she was assigned a woman's place: important and influential, but limited, variable, and always secondary.

ON TRIAL for his life in the spring of 1537 for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace Robert Aske from the Tower supplied a retrospective explanation of northen resentment at the dissolution of the monasteries, at that stage still very much in progress and nowhere near completion. Of all the recent changes in religion, he in particular grudged against the statute of suppressions, and so did all the country, because the abbeys in the north gave great alms to poor men and laudably served God: in which parts of late days they had small comfort by ghostly teaching. And by the said suppression the service of God is much minished, great number of masses unsaid and consecration of the sacrament now not used in those parts, to the decrease of the faith and spiritual comfort to man's soul, the temple of God ruffed and pulled down, the ornaments and relics of the church irreverently used, tombs of honourable and noble men pulled down and sold, no hospitality now kept in those parts…

Also the abbeys was one of the beauties of this realm to all men and strangers passing through the same; also all gentlemen much succoured in their needs with money, their younger sons there succoured and in nunneries their daughters brought up in virtue, and also their evidences and money left to the uses of infants in abbeys' hands, always sure there…

After her third consecutive election victory in 1987, Margaret Thatcher chose as her holiday reading Norman Gash's biography of Lord Liverpool. It was a fitting tribute from one remarkably durable prime minister to another. No one now thinks of Liverpool as a mediocrity, let alone an arch one, and the fact that many of his colleagues were more flamboyant than he was merely adds to his stature. His achievements as a statesman are emphasised by Gash, who depicts him as ‘one of the great through unacknowledged architects of the liberal, free trade Victorian state’, the first exponent of a public doctrine which, in both its economic and its moral components, would be taken up triumphantly by his successors—Peel, Gladstone, and (it might be argued) Thatcher. His achievements as a politician, meanwhile, can be measured by the fact that he sustained a fifteen year premiership, broken only by his stroke in February 1827, during a period of extreme social and economic difficulty. This seems all the more remarkable in view of the fact that the eighteenth century had seemed to demonstrate that in order to run a stable administration, a first lord of the treasury needed to be in the House of Commons.