the english parliaments of henry vii, 1485–1504 – by p.r. cavill

REVIEWSparh_216 460..488

A Short History of Parliament: England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Irelandand Scotland. Edited by Clyve Jones. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. 2009. xiv,386 pp. £75.00. ISBN 9781843835035.

In his prologue, the editor describes this collection of 26 essays as ‘a short institutionalhistory of the parliaments of the British Isles’; political developments are only consideredwhen they lead to institutional change. The greater part of the book is devoted to theWestminster parliament, with separate chapters on the two Houses from 1307, followedby brief accounts of the other parliaments. Most chapters include a chronology ofsignificant events and a list of further reading.

The only authors who consider the Westminster parliament as a whole are JohnMaddicott on parliament before 1215 and Paul Brand on the succeeding period to 1307.Maddicott shows how the councils of the Anglo-Saxon kings developed into parliamentand how the problems of taxation led to the emergence of a representative role for themembers of 12th-century assemblies.The crisis that led to Magna Carta was significantin the development of royal councils into parliament. Brand continues the story bydescribing the use of the new term ‘parliament’ in the 13th century. Gradually, atten-dance at these assemblies extended beyond magnates to judges and to representatives ofshires and of boroughs who met to consider national questions, particularly taxation andmatters beyond the kingdom.Towards the end of the 13th century, statutes and petitionsfor justice or favours were added to the business of parliament. Both chapters containclear and economical surveys of the emergence of parliament.

After 1307, the history of the two Houses is treated separately. In his account of thelater medieval Lords, Chris Given-Wilson provides an excellent and succinct account ofthe development of the two Houses in the 14th century. One is surprised to learn thatthe term ‘House of Lords’ only emerged in the 16th century.The section on ‘High Courtof Parliament’ contains a fascinating account of the judicial work of parliament and theparticular role of the Lords. The history of the Lords from 1529 to 1707 is the subjectof chapters by David L. Smith, Jason Peacey and Robin Eagles. Smith points out howsmall the peerage was in the Tudor century: 54 peers in 1529; 55 peers in 1603.The biasin his chapter towards the early Stuart period reflects the need for more research into theTudor house of lords. Peacey writes on the Lords during the tumult of civil war whenthe number of peers attending the House fell to three or four by 1648. During theseyears, the Commons first claimed political superiority as the representative body of thekingdom.The proposal, still controversial, that the second House should be elected wasfirst mooted in December 1659.With Eagles on the Lords from 1660 to 1707, we beginto get a flavour of the modern world: James Vernon suggested that the meeting ofparliament in 1699 be delayed because of a meet at Newmarket, which reflects the

Parliamentary History, Vol. 29, pt. 3 (2010), pp. 460–488

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difficulties in managing business, as is also shown in the useful discussions of bishops andof officers of the House.

Simon Payling writes on the emergence of the Commons and draws attention to theimportance of taxation. The peculiar geographical development of parliamentary bor-oughs with an inexplicable bias towards the south-west counties is emphasized. Thechapters on the medieval period reflect the importance of the new edition of theparliament rolls. The history of the early modern Commons has been the subject ofgreat controversy and the measured accounts by Alastair Hawkyard, Paul Hunneyballand Stephen Roberts are welcome. Hawkyard provides valuable details on meetings andprocedure, including the origin of divisions between 1529 and 1603. Hunneyball iseffective in describing the growing confidence of the early Stuart Commons in relationto the Crown but he stresses that success was more likely when the two Houses workedtogether as with the revival of impeachment in 1621. Roberts provides an admirablesummary of the complex history of the Commons between 1640 and 1660. Particularlyenjoyable are his sardonic accounts of two parliamentary heroes: Speaker Lenthall,‘money-grubbing and whinging’, and the diarist Sir Simonds D’Ewes – ‘his ownpersonality is evident on every page of his diary’.

So far, we have learned little on the relationship between parliament and the public.Clyve Jones and Stephen Farrell describe how dissenting peers appealed to the early-18th-century public by publishing records of protests against lost divisions. In a vigorousaccount of the 18th-century Commons, Bob Harris relates the growth of public accessdirectly to the galleries or lobby and indirectly through published accounts of debatesand proceedings. Harris includes an interesting defence of the unreformed Commons.Philip Salmon picks up the story with a critical account of the 19th-century Commonsdominated by the growth of ministerial control, the increase of public business, electoralreform, the development of parties and the ‘rage for speaking’. This is an original andstimulating chapter both for its account of developments in the Commons and for itsreflections on public interest in politics.

A new relationship between the two Houses developed in the 20th century. In a goodcontribution, William Frame discusses the 1911 Parliament Act and the response of theLords up to the 1949 Parliament Act. Peter Dorey outlines the dismal failure, after 1949,to complete the reform of the Lords and how the House has responded positively to thisfailure.These two chapters are good accounts of the 20th-century Lords and show thatthe importance of the revising work of the House increased as the power of theexecutive grew in the Commons. Philip Norton draws attention to the prestige gainedby the Commons during the Second World War and how the House failed to use thisadvantage to challenge, as Paul Seaward describes in the succeeding chapter, the ‘irongrip of the party leaderships and the whips’.

The book continues with commendable accounts, all with good reading lists, of theold Scottish parliament by Julian Goodare, the old Irish parliament by Charles IvarMcGrath, and the Northern Ireland assemblies by Graham Walker.The editor concludesthe book with summary accounts, without reading lists, of the minor parliaments, of theOireachtas (very brief), and of the new assemblies in Scotland and Wales.

Almost every chapter considers set themes and it is possible to track developmentsover the centuries, e.g., the publication of debates and proceedings; changes in thechamber of each assembly; the judicial work of the Lords. More specialised topics are

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considered in a series of inserts, e.g., a valuable account of the language of parliament (p.25), attendances at some Scottish parliaments (p. 305).

A handsome and expensive production, this collection attempts an ambitious task incovering the history of parliament over the last 1,000 years. Inevitably, there are a fewslips.The insert on Hansard (p. 260) can be read to suggest that Lords Hansard was onlypublished separately from the beginning of Commons Hansard sixth series whereas bothHouses established separate Hansard offices in 1909 and Lords Hansard fifth series is stillin progress. The account on page 207 of the referendal theory developed by the 3rdmarquess of Salisbury is misleading in suggesting that the theory lost its validity after1911. A Lords Library Note, entitled The Salisbury Doctrine and available over theinternet, traces the history of this doctrine, sometimes called a convention, to 2006.These are minor flaws and we must congratulate the editor for gathering together somany able contributors, for persuading them to produce well-matched contributions, andfor producing a valuable and accessible survey of parliamentary history in these islands.

DAVID LEWIS JONES

The English Parliaments of Henry VII, 1485–1504. By P.R. Cavill. (OxfordHistorical Monographs.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. xvi, 296 pp.£55.00. ISBN 9780199573837.

As Steven Gunn pointed out in his excellent article on the state of Henry VII studies,‘Henry VII in Context’ (History, xcii, 1997), the reign of the first Tudor monarchbestrides a liminal moment – the last medievalist or the first Tudor. Eclipsed by hispredecessor, Richard III, and his son, Henry VIII, Henry VII has largely been studied inrelation to something else. Studies of Henry, too, have suffered from a lack of sourcematerial, especially the paucity of state papers and the limitations of the Parliament Rolls.The latter contain less information than the earlier ones, the Lords Journal only begins in1510 and it is not until Henry’s grandson, Edward VI, reaches the throne that parlia-mentary historians can peruse a Commons Journal. But all is not lost, far from it in fact,as Paul Cavill amptly demonstrates in this detailed and admirable study of Henry VII’sparliaments. What Cavill’s work highlights is the importance (realized by all too fewworking in the field) of venturing outside the cloistered confines of The NationalArchives, and into the rich world of local record offices. The bibliography lists 30archives and even a brief glimpse at the footnotes reveals that this is not merely paddingbut a veritable treasure trove of information.Through this detailed archival work, Cavillhas rescued the parliaments of Henry VII from obscurity and obfuscation and presentedthem in, dare I say it, the Tudor world of debate, opposition, rhetoric and judicature.

Cavill follows a very Eltonian model, reconstructing the procedure of the Houses andthe legislative interests, aims and policies of the crown.The first section, ‘The Crown andParliament’, looks at how Henry VII viewed and interacted with parliament throughceremony, speeches and fiscal policy. ‘Parliament and the Polity’ is the title of the secondpart, which tackles issues as diverse as elections, the circulation of parliamentary pro-ceedings and the local collection of taxation. What Cavill highlights in the first half of

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the book is the widespread interest in parliament and its interaction with the governingclass.The section on lobbying illustrates the often sophisticated techniques employed byMPs and interest groups. Co-ordination was certainly the key for the 14 Cinque PortMPs who organised themselves to wine and dine their fellow MPs and judges from theupper House to maintain their constituencies’ tax-exempt status in the 1489–90 parlia-ment (p. 154). Not to be outdone, the London lobbies were at the forefront, from thecarpenters hanging around the 1497 parliament to the pewterers plying the clerk ofCommons with wine until they received a list of MPs to lobby. These are techniquesfamiliar to parliamentary historians of Elizabethan and Stuart England.

Although hindered by a lack of extant evidence, the brief section on ‘ReportingParliament’ (pp. 175–80) hints at the possibility that information flowed freely out ofparliament and back to constituencies and friends. Certainly MPs brought copies of actsback with them and letters (too few unfortunately) detail parliamentary activity. This,too, was helped by the printing (from 1491) of the statutes in English. Combinedtogether, these sections breathe life into the parliaments of the first Tudor monarch,revealing their dynamic interaction with those not elected but represented.

However, it is in the final section, ‘Parliament under the “New Monarchy” ’, that thebook really comes to life as Cavill engages with the established wisdom on Henry’sparliaments – was parliament really in decline, largely subsumed under the control of themonarch? Did Henry even wish to dispense with parliament once it had served its initialpurpose of legitimating and solidifying his position on the throne? These ‘myths’ areconvincingly laid to rest: ‘Henry’s reign consolidated the tripartite parliament of twoequipollent houses; more than ever before, it interpreted parliament as a legislature; andit pointed the way towards further extending parliament’s authority in the next reign’ (p.244). Thus Cavill hints at perhaps the most important aspect of this study. His researchhas uncovered much about the role, attitude and participation of the Commons. Someof this was foreshadowed in his prize-winning article in this journal, ‘Debate and Dissentin Henry VII’s Parliaments’ (Parliamentary History, xxv, 2006) but here, for the first time,we really see the involvement of the lower House in all the proceedings and decisionsof parliament.

That said, the book does require the reader to do much of the interpretive heavylifting. Structurally, it would have been vastly improved by amalgamating the analysis ofpart 3 into the first two sections.The earlier parts are largely just narrative with a shortconcluding paragraph of summation that functions more as abstracts than conclusions.This is clearly the result of this being the book of a dissertation and really morerestructuring is needed to fit into the confines of a published monograph. It means thatthe importance of Cavill’s argument is buried and it will require a dedicated reader toplough through until page 199 when the argument starts to emerge. This is in manyways a shame, and while it hardly diminishes the book’s worth, the reader will needa specialised knowledge of the historiography of Henry VII (and earlier . . . and later)to contextualise much of the book. But for those willing to do the interpretive work,the experience will be rich and rewarding. As Cavill pithily concludes: ‘far from beingcharacterized by quiescence, Henry VII’s parliaments should probably be noted for theirbusyness’ (p. 245). This is far from the traditional story of a weak and humbledinstitution doing the bidding of the monarch and waiting to be ‘save[d] in the 1530s’(p. 246).

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Henry VII studies have undergone something of a revival recently with Sean Cun-ningham’s new biography, Henry VII (2007) and a wealth of important essays in adedicated issue of Historical Research (2009). Cavill’s rewriting of Henry VII’s parliamentsis a welcome addition to this new corpus of material and a rare monograph on the reign.It will stand as the definitive work for many years to come and in the future, no studyof early Tudor politics will be complete without acknowledging a great debt to thisimportant book.

CHRIS R. KYLESyracuse University

Witchcraft and the Act of 1604. Edited by John Newton and Jo Bath. (Studies inMedieval and Reformation Traditions, 131.) Leiden and Boston: Brill. 2008. xi,248 pp. €99.00. ISBN 9789004165281.

The English Witchcraft Act of 1604 was wider in scope and more severe than theprevious English act of 1563. It made practically all conceivable dealings with evil orwicked spirits felonies, and created a new felony of exhuming dead bodies for magicalpurposes. It severely penalised any attempt to cause harm by occult means, even ifunsuccessful, and increased the penalties for injuring by witchcraft, and using witchcraftor other magical means to discover the whereabouts of goods or treasure, or provokeunlawful love. Only in 1736 was this statute repealed, along with the Scottish WitchcraftAct of 1563. No person was thenceforth to be prosecuted for witchcraft or kindredoffences, but any person pretending to exercise witchcraft, or use magical powers forsundry purposes was to be imprisoned for a year.

This collection of essays helps to answer three main questions: Why was the 1604Witchcraft Act introduced? What were its effects? Why was that act repealed in 1736?The first and third questions naturally encompass both motive and timing. Should the1604 act be attributed to the personal initiative of James I, a zealous investigator ofwitchcraft in Scotland in 1590–1 who had published his Daemonologie as recently as1597? P.G. Maxwell-Stuart and Clive Holmes argue that it should not be, though theyadmit the possibility that those responsible for its introduction may have expected James’sapproval and seen his first parliament as an opportune moment for fresh legislation.Maxwell-Stuart points out that the specific provisions of the act didn’t reflect James’sexperience. Neither James’s Daemonologie nor the Scottish act of 1563 served as a model.He is inclined to attribute the act’s ‘extra judicial rigour’ to Sir Edmund Anderson, chiefjustice of common pleas. Holmes, in a satisfying unravelling of complex events, arguesthat Richard Bancroft and his protégé Samuel Harsnett perceived that James had alreadybecome much more sceptical about diabolical agency in some Scottish witchcraft cases.Only such a perception could have emboldened Harsnett to publish, days before James’saccession, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a work that ridiculed catholic, andespecially Jesuit, exorcisms, and ‘tarred with the same brushes’ (p. 75) those puritans whohad been involved in dispossession. Harsnett seemed to impugn James’s own previouslypublished ideas, but James very soon ‘identified with the practical scepticism embodied

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by adopted Harsnett’ (p. 90). Harsnett’s earlier work, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practicesof John Darrell (1599), had targeted a puritan minister.As Clive Holmes and Tom Websterpoint out, Darrell strongly rebutted any suggestion that his seeking dispossession throughfasting and prayer resembled catholic exorcism. Webster also criticizes some recentwriters for their readiness to accept the sorts of ‘natural’ explanation of possessionfavoured by Harsnett at the time. He urges historians to take seriously the perceptionof Satan.

What were the results of the passage of the 1604 act? Prosecutions fell sharply afterJames’s accession. Marion Gibson’s analysis of news pamphlets about witch trials inthree counties before and after 1604 leads to the conclusion that ‘the 1604 WitchcraftAct had little or no effect on how witchcraft was prosecuted by the courts – or reportedfrom them’ (p. 127). The treatment of potential witches in the north-east of Englandbetween 1649 and 1680 shows, according to Jo Bath, that people ‘interacted with andcombated witches’ in many different ways, and ‘largely without reference to the legalposition’ (pp. 144–5). However, in the exceptional circumstances of 1645 MatthewHopkins and John Stearne were able to use force to extract confessions that ‘focussedon the sealing of satanic pacts’ and launch in eastern England a notorious witch-huntthat, in Malcolm Gaskill’s words, ‘released the pent-up frustrations of witch-fearingvillagers’ (p. 163). Gaskill explores the preoccupations revealed by the confessions of thepoor and vulnerable accused. The 1604 act supplied Jacobean playwrights with whatChris Brooks calls ‘dramatic fodder’ (p. 148). Marston and Middleton created luridly evilwitches, Shakespeare an eloquent language of witchcraft in Macbeth, discussed by RoyBooth. But between 1620 and 1640, Brooks argues, the stage witch became a muchmore pitiable or comic figure. Jonathan Barry, in this collection’s penultimate essay,builds on, and further develops, Ian Bostridge’s characterisation of Richard Bovet’sPandaemonium (1684) as the work of a political radical hostile to priestcraft and theRestoration court who to some extent used witchcraft theory as a cover for an attackon Roman catholicism.

English prosecutions for witchcraft had declined to a trickle long before the lastknown indictment in 1717. The sponsors of the 1736 act were, Owen Davies remarks,a motley assortment of MPs united only by their whig allegiance and possibly by adetermination to restrict churchmen’s political influence. Some of the Scottish clergywere amongst the most vocal critics of repeal, and the bulk of orthodox anglicanopinion, while accepting that witches had ceased to exist in Britain, did not reject theconcept of witchcraft itself. Some commentators believed that repeal actually helpeddestroy belief in witchcraft. But, Davies concludes, there is abundant evidence that manyof the poor continued to fear it. Counter-magic remained their main weapon against it,after the passage of the act as before.

John Newton’s introduction touches on ‘some of the ways that these individual essaysdialogue with each other’ and attempts ‘to sketch a hypothetical framework in order toexamine some aspects of how the codes concerning witchcraft shifted, with particularreference to the Acts’ (p. 5). The texts of the relevant English statutes and canon 72 of1604 are included as appendices. All historians of witchcraft and demonology will needto consult this collection. None of the essays in it is directly concerned with parliamen-tary history or processes. (A note on page 237 implies that more might possibly havebeen said about the passage of the 1604 act.) However, the essays by Maxwell-Stuart,

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Holmes and Davies throw much light on the context of legislation, and those by Gibson,Bath and Gaskill on its enforcement.

RALPH HOULBROOKEUniversity of Reading

The English Civil War: Conflict and Contexts, 1640–49. Edited by John Adamson.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. vii, 344 pp. Hardback £65.00; paperback£24.99. ISBN 9780333986554; 9780333986561.

The English civil war and interregnum have been peculiarly well-served by the Problemsin Focus series. The Origins of the English Civil War, edited by Conrad Russell, has beensuggested by Nicholas Tyacke as a candidate for the Ur-text of revisionism; Reactions tothe English Civil War, 1642–1649, edited by John Morrill, is notable, not least for theeditor’s own contribution on the Church of England, which has proved proleptic ofmuch recent scholarship on the strength of prayer book protestantism; while TheInterregnum:The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, edited by Gerald Aylmer, contains, in aconsistently brilliant collection, the deeply influential work of Keith Thomas on theLevellers and the franchise and Quentin Skinner on Hobbes and the Engagementcontroversy.These works are remarkable both for their impact and their longevity.Thatthis new collection does not look out of place in such illustrious company is testamentboth to the vitality of mid-17th-century studies, and to the particular historiographicalmoment that has produced it. Following the upheavals wrought by revisionists it is timeto start to construct a new understanding of the mid century, and to ask, now that thedust has finally settled, what remains of the revisionists’ cases?

This kind of historiographical positioning is one of the great strengths of the book,and this is nowhere clearer than in John Adamson’s exceptional introduction.The readeris led from the colossal achievements of Gardiner (whose themes ‘are arguably moreinfluential on Civil-War historiography at the beginning of the twenty-first century thanat any point since the 1890s’ (p. 5)) through the various explanations and controversiesinfluenced and sparked by Weberian and Marxist formulae to the revisionist backlash.This is an old story, but Adamson’s analysis is often refreshingly novel, and the eleganceof his exposition is all too rare.Take, for example, his statement that ‘Weberian thought(as popularized by Tawney)’ meant that ‘Every locus of virtue had its correspondingrepository of vice; each forward-moving element of progress was opposed by its ownlaggardly agent of reaction’ (p. 12), or his comment that in the gentry controversy ‘it maywell have been because the combatants were actually in agreement over so manyfundamental articles of historical faith that their disputes over questions of explanationacquired their almost theological asperity’ (p. 16). Following this overview Adamson laysout his hopes that this volume will ‘point to at least some of the elements, thematic andmethodological’ from which a ‘new narrative’ might be built after the ground-clearingexercise of revisionism (p. 24).

Maybe the most important new element is to be found in consideration of ‘the king’sparty’, for a long time neglected by historiographical traditions that had little time, and

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occasionally moral opprobrium, for the losers. David Scott’s excellent essay suggests theways in which the study of the royalists might proceed. By the time he has finished, thereis little left of David Smith’s taxonomy of ‘the king’s party’ based around the notion ofconstitutional royalism, and in its place Scott erects a subtler understanding of royalistfactions and the ways in which these formed around key questions concerning foreignintervention.This is compelling, and the argument that ‘to portray royalist factionalism asessentially a struggle for or over the constitution is a distortion’ is well taken (p. 59).However, it will be intriguing to see whether later work, without the need to dismissSmith, will retain the same emphasis on the ‘political and tactical’ over the ‘ideological’(p. 58).When Scott turns, at the end, to discuss the different beliefs in the royalist groupsabout how the king should ‘reaffirm and exercise his authority’ (p. 58) when returned tothe throne he does state that different positions on the centrality of episcopacy (key forthe Richmond-Hertford group), or the importance of control of military force above allelse (the view of Jermyn and Culpeper), would have major constitutional effects. Whatis more, these variant positions are seen as being grounded on different understandingsof the basis of the king’s authority: was it ‘moral or political’ (p. 60)? Was it better to befeared than loved? Scott has certainly overturned a crude understanding of ideologicaldivision, but here he has also provided the foundations for an altogether more nuancedand convincing one.

Scott’s essay, while it grows out of one ‘of the Revisionists’ “negative propositions” ’(p. 24) – the removal of the particular moral framework from history which hadsuppressed the serious study of royalism – is also indebted to perhaps the revisionists’greatest positive contribution: the rediscovery of the significance of the ‘British’ context.None the less, the new British history could remain markedly anglocentric, and this isavoided in this collection by way of essays by Jane Ohlmeyer and Allan Macinnes.Ohlmeyer makes a good case for setting the civil wars in Ireland within a baronialcontext – a context which was arguably more significant in Ireland than in England.Macinnes examines the ‘Scottish Moment’ of 1638–45 in which ‘a Scottish-led agendaprevailed in the British Isles’. This agenda ‘was neither an imperial nor a hegemonicconstruct’ but ‘a radical vision of Britain that was federative and constitutional, confes-sional but not sectarian’ (p.126).This is a magisterial essay, combining deft argument witha powerful underlying narrative: it will become the essential reading for students on thissubject. One of the themes that also comes through both Ohlmeyer’s and Macinnes’sessays is the European context for the civil wars. Macinnes, in particular, raises questionsabout whether failing adequately to account for this context leaves an unjustifiable gapin our understanding. His argument that ‘in essence, the Bishops’ Wars constituted theBritish theatre of the Thirty Years War’ (p. 128) – a case more strongly put here thanelsewhere – is sure to encourage future studies.

Other essays do not so much build on revisionist emphases, as return to topicswhich had been abandoned. It is gratifying to see radicalism return as a subject ofstudy, although it is now seen to encompass far more strands than in ChristopherHill’s day. Philip Baker’s essay provides a broad survey of radical thinkers and move-ments, and tilts at both Hill and Jonathan Scott to show the range of radical thought,and the fact that secular and religious veins are identifiable and interwoven. Membersof the parliamentarian elite, often painted as in some sense conservative, are seen inBaker’s account as demanding radical change in the political sphere. If this is a striking

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reappropriation, then Anthony Milton’s discussion of anglican radicalism is even moreprovocative. His chapter, which challenges the notion that anglicanism was necessarily‘erastian, conservative, [and] moderating’ (p. 62) in the 1640s, demonstrates the incred-ible vitality of anglican thought, and the way in which the experiences of the 1640sand 1650s could detonate theological explosions. It is useful to be reminded, forexample, that Jeremy Taylor came to reject the concept of original sin, and a furtherindex of the ‘radicalism’ of this statement might be found in the fact that, as WilliamPoole has recently observed, the Presbyterian, Nathaniel Stephens, attacked both Taylorand the Putney debater and general baptist, Robert Everard, in the same work. Else-where Jason Peacey offers a new account of the emergence of radicalism in responseto perceptions of parliament: ‘It was disillusionment with parliamentary procedures,rather than political theory, which prompted “radical” solutions, and these can beshown to have emerged from across the political spectrum’ (p. 103). It might now bethought that the challenge lies in considering further how political theory was usedin this context. Perhaps the relationship between theory and context in driving thedevelopment of radicalism will reveal itself to be more dynamic than this initial char-acterisation suggests.

Peacey’s essay is, however, a masterful piece, and it marks the welcome return of thestudy of print culture as a key to the period. Peacey shows how a study of perceptionsof parliament can actually illuminate parliamentary history itself. That many contem-porary commentators ‘perceived something at odds with the picture painted by his-torians such as Mark Kishlansky’ and recognized ‘that adversarial politics emerged inthe early 1640s’ (p. 89) is worthy of serious consideration, and leads to a counter-revisionist conclusion. The remaining two essays are even more strident in their argu-ments to reject elements of revisionists’ work. Ian Gentles, in a lucid piece on Fairfax’sarmy, is unlikely to convince many revisionists with what often seems to be a restate-ment of old cases. However, he does provide a salutary reminder of the power of thestatement that the king was a ‘man of blood’ to cut a swathe through Sean Kelsey’srecent arguments about the trial of Charles I. We eagerly await the fuller refutation ofKelsey’s arguments to be provided by Clive Holmes in a forthcoming article. Holmes’sessay here, on the relationship between centre and locality, like Gentles’s, argues an oldcase (one first put by Holmes some 30 years ago in a classic article in the Journal ofBritish Studies), but he does so with a force which makes his conclusions almostinescapable. Of course, this is, in part, because, as Holmes recognizes, so much of hisoriginal attack on the county community school has been adopted within recentwork, even that of a revisionist hue. He does seek to make his central points – that‘the dominant ideological framework within which local concerns . . . are expressed isessentially national’, and ‘that the interests of the locality could best be advanced . . . bycooperating with central authority’ (p. 153) – in a new way. Having discovered thelinguistic turn, Holmes seeks to show that the very ‘texts’ (a word which he gleefullyrepeats throughout) on which the localist interpretation was built, in fact sustain hisinterpretation. The method has changed, but it has only strengthened the argument,and Holmes’s judgment that ‘Local issues had to be comprehended within a languageof national identity and of common law’ and that ‘the absence of an alternativediscourse’ meant that ‘a “Revolt of the Provinces” was simply impossible’ (p. 174)remains telling. This is, therefore, an important book, and it suggests that the way

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forward at times lies in going back to some of the themes which the revisionistssought to jettison.

GEORGE SOUTHCOMBESomerville College, Oxford

Oliver Cromwell: New Perspectives. Edited by Patrick Little. Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan. 2009. 278 pp. Hardback £55.00; paperback £18.99. ISBN9780230574205; 9780230574212.

Patrick Little’s new collection of essays begins on a note of modesty. If, as he suggests,the promise of New Perspectives on the career of England’s lord protector ‘requires acertain amount of justification’, it is only because the stream of Cromwellian studiesremains incessant. Little’s work will have to fight its corner against over 160 full-lengthCromwellian biographies, and a seemingly inexhaustible industry for doctoral theses,articles and monographs concerned with the rise of the New Model Army and thegovernment of Commonwealth and protectorate. Consciously avoiding the most ubiq-uitous themes in recent historiography – puritan piety, the politics of the later 1640s orthe workings of the protectoral parliaments – the essays within this book arise from aseries of discrete specialist areas. Ranging from the Cambridgeshire squirearchy to theCromwellian court, moving across covenanting Scotland and the godly enclaves of Walesand Ireland, Little and his co-contributors contend that a fresher insight can be offeredonly by varying the scholarly angles from which the period is perceived.

Although an extension into new areas of study puts the reader face-to-face with muchattractively-unfamiliar detail, this collection is conceived to be of more than antiquarianvalue. Little’s introduction presents an acute reading of the currently scholarly scene,identifying a number of distortions induced by the fashionable emphases of recentdecades. Cromwell, he argues, has come to appear too much a ‘distant, godly head ofstate’. A plethora of works concentrating on religious mentalities have, inadvertently,restored the elusive mystique of the Cromwellian career by representing an unworldlyfigure, steered – as he saw it – by the stars of divine will, looking at his world througha Biblical kaleidoscope, and obsessed more by debates over godly unity and christianliberty than the cut and thrust of political exchange. Little’s quietly provocative alter-native picture builds upon his past editions on the trends of interregnum politics andgovernment after 1653. Here he links his argument to recent works by Blair Worden andPaul Hunneyball to suggest that ‘the tectonic plates of Cromwellian studies are on themove once again’. The Cromwell who emerges from this collection is earthed firmlywithin the practicalities of power, more of the politician and less of the ingénue, as muchas a strategist in Westminster as he was a genius of the battlefield. The arc of his careercan, it is suggested, be explained – if not exactly anticipated – by certain dynamicsevident in the house of commons, the army, even East Anglia itself, in the years beforeCromwell took political centre stage.

There is much within this book to relish. Centred on relatively unexplored sources,all chapters add to our knowledge: it is rare, and pleasurable, to find a work with such

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a diversity of subjects possessing no ‘weak link’. The ‘stand-out’ contributions are madeby Philip Baker’s exploration of the relationship between Cromwell and the Levellersand Little’s own forensic examination of the activity of John Thurloe in the monthsbefore the 1657 offer of the crown. Baker’s recent work has offered a rich and sensitiveengagement with the nuances of English radicalism through the years of civil war: here,he argues that the spectacular clash of personalities between John Lilburne and the armygrandees has obscured the genuine intimacy between Cromwell and other figuresemerging from the radical margins of independency – notably William Walwyn – thatendured beyond the Putney debates. A strong ideological affinity made even Iretonreluctant to enter into a full assault on Leveller principles in 1647, and Baker suggeststhat the eventual breakdown in the relationship informed the troubled undertone toCromwell’s political reflections into the 1650s. But by 1657, the confidantes encirclingthe lord protector were tugging him in a different direction. In throwing open themachinations of John Thurloe, Patrick Little shows how the spymaster made brilliant useof the failed ‘Sindercombe plot’ to foment support for a Cromwellian coronation,manipulating the intelligence, feeding information selectively into the political nation,and building up a party bent on overturning eight years of republican rule. A study ofThurloe’s influence, according to Little, reminds us how Cromwell allowed himself tocome within touching distance of the throne – that he was able to turn its rejection sopublicly to his advantage remains the most potent testimony to a form of idealism lacedwith the calculations of practical politics.

The other chapters serve equally to bring Cromwellian high ideals into balance withthe temptations of low politics, and the force of the individual’s aggravating personality.In Cambridgeshire, Cromwell’s notoriety was fully established by 1636, after a venomousclash over the family inheritance and an attempt to cast his maternal uncle into a lunaticasylum – this, Simon Healey suggests, was the likely trigger to his brief emotionalcollapse, and the intensification of his vision of sin and salvation.The conduct of the firstcivil war scarcely dampened the image of a man jostling to be ‘Lord of the Fens’. S.L.Sadler shows how Cromwell was drawn into vitriolic entanglements with fellow officers:confrontations that increasingly began to fall upon political and religious lines. Energy,volatility and incipient radicalism also distinguished Cromwell’s early parliamentarycareer. Stephen Roberts paints a picture very different from the received image of therough and callow back bencher – his Cromwell thrived upon the tremors in nationalpolitics, actively sought out alliances with the most strident and confessional critics ofCharles I, and made himself quite at ease in the chamber and the committee room.Moving beyond the formative years, further essays by Little, Lloyd Bowen and KirsteenMacKenzie depict Cromwell’s engagements with Scotland, Ireland and Wales less as theproduct of incurious ideology than as long-term political, personal and even financialconsiderations, albeit given clear colouration by his Independent godly spirit. In gov-ernment, he is shown repeatedly searching for ways to bolster the civil against themilitary interest. The court, as Andrew Barclay argues, was no mere place of pageantry,but worked towards a decidedly political end, with household members hand-picked forthe purpose of providing a counterweight to the soldiery. Likewise, the promotion ofRichard Cromwell followed, as Jason Peacey suggests, a wholly conventional course fora potential heir – justifiable too, when the eldest son stepped out of the shadows to showhimself a clever, capable and moderate-minded member of the public domain.

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Together these essays serve to demystify Cromwell: his pathway becomes no lessexceptional, but easier to comprehend, his caprices are revisited as the intuitions of arational, if highly provocative, political mind. But for all the many gaps filled in, and themany illuminating descriptive touches, it is far less certain that the perspectives presentedin this book will be able to provide a permanent reframing of the picture of OliverCromwell. As Little concedes, the case for a more ‘civilian’ Cromwell presented herecould – and surely will – be rigorously contested by students of the army, whosecontinuing political power is not examined in this work. Perhaps the greatest inhibitionis in the very title of this volume – the return to the one factor in the period least likelyto offer historians any further elucidation: the character of Cromwell himself. It is aregrettable fact that, since every generation remakes Cromwell in its own image, thereality is that few volumes dedicated so personally to the study of the protector are goingto rise above ephemeral status, even when – as in this case – it would be thoroughlydeserved.

The enduring appeal of Oliver Cromwell lies, as Patrick Little comments, in his‘restless’ nature. Yet, despite the failure of any one interpretation to capture all thecontradictions in the Cromwellian psyche, historians still abide by an almost positivisticapproach in their attempts to define the concerns and preoccupations of the lordprotector. The danger of this enduring ‘Great Man’ perspective is that readers are leftwith a series of tit-for-tat rejoinders and counterblasts, an endless debate that scarcelymoves off the terrain laid down by the original Victorian patriarchs of civil war history.The greatest peril is that excess concentration on Cromwell himself impedes us from anyserious advancement of knowledge of the period, and it can surely be no coincidencethat the best moments in this work arise when the authors step away from theimprisoning gaze of their chief subject to posit uncharted territory – ideas, cultures,networks and individuals hitherto cast to the margins by an overwhelming emphasis onone personality. It is the reflections on John Thurloe, Richard Cromwell, the politicalculture of covenanting Scotland and the militants of the Long Parliament that really givethis book its value, but to grant centre stage to the more original themes requires us tododge the intended priority of the volume, and circumvent Oliver himself. Perhaps it isonly by allowing Cromwell, finally, to rest that we will find the best way of unlockingthe genuinely new perspectives presented in this volume.

GABRIEL GLICKMANHertford College, Oxford

The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley. Edited by Thomas N. Corns, AnnHughes and David Loewenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. 2volumes. xiii, 1,065 pp. £180.00. ISBN 9780199576067.

Since the late 19th century, Gerrard Winstanley has been regarded as one of the moststriking and interesting of the actors and thinkers thrown up by the mid-17th-centuryEnglish revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, Christopher Hill established Winstanley’ssignificance and reputation (endorsed in the work under review) as the ‘foremost radical’

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of the period, and this edition of Winstanley’s works is justly dedicated to Hill. It replacesthe work of G.H. Sabine, a distinguished American political scientist and historian ofpolitical thought, who in 1941 produced what has, for almost 70 years, remained aserviceable edition of Winstanley’s works and an invaluable resource for students of theEnglish revolution. It was reprinted in 1965. But increasingly it has come to seem marredby an outdated grasp of the biographical facts of the lives, both of Winstanley and of hisassociates in the famous ‘digging’ experiments; by the discovery of some further, textualmaterial; by an absence of annotation of the texts, and by Sabine’s selectivity.While hisedition remains reasonably comprehensive, Sabine reproduced only extracts of Winstan-ley’s first three tracts, reducing what in the Oxford edition now amounts to 306 pagesto about ten. Sabine’s justification for this was partly space and ‘partly because lessinterest attaches to books written before Winstanley’s discovery of communism’. But, ashe demonstrated elsewhere in his introduction, the communism is almost impossible tounderstand without the religion.The Oxford edition also includes a significant ‘Incour-agement to Take the Engagement’ (or oath of loyalty to the new English republic) underthe title of England’s Spirit Unfoulded, a tract which was first brought to light by G.E.Aylmer in 1968. The Oxford editors prefer second, amended editions of the texts andthere is some sensible, if relatively minor, re-ordering of Sabine’s attempt at a chrono-logical sequencing of the works. One consequence of the privileging of second editionsis that a work well known as The True Levellers Standard Advanced appears as A Declarationto the Powers of England, as it was less familiarly entitled in the later edition. Someancillary documentation is usefully added and the material produced under the name ofthe Diggers of Buckinghamshire is omitted. Otherwise, the texts here are very close tothose of the Sabine edition, the exception being that we are given the full texts ofWinstanley’s first three works. The value of the new edition, therefore, rests largely onthose inclusions, the greater reliability of the texts and their full annotation, the muchenhanced biographical information and the editors’ introductory contextualisation ofthe works.

Sabine categorised Winstanley’s politics as those of ‘utopian socialism’, rooted in theprinciple of mutual aid and co-operation. He and the Levellers epitomised the ‘two rivaltypes of modern revolutionary radicalism’, individualism and its rejection. Such viewsnow look outdated, even anachronistic. Like others since, the editors echo Sabine’semphasis on Winstanley’s pacifism and quietism, a position which must be qualified,given the latter’s reliance on the military overthrow of the Norman Yoke and his ownelaboration of a republic literally armed against the return of kingly government.Thankslargely to the work of J.D. Alsop, John Gurney and others, we now know a good dealmore about Winstanley’s early and later life, the strain of responsibility and respectabilityrunning through it, and about the nature of the digging experiments. Nevertheless,Sabine avoided the common tendency to secularise Winstanley’s politics and, until theappearance of the work under review, his edition retained its value and parts of hisintroduction are still worth reading.

Impressive scholarship, care and completeness underpin the new edition and theeditors, each distinguished in a different field of 17th-century studies, are to be con-gratulated on having produced what will surely remain the definitive edition for manyyears to come. This reviewer has been unable to identify more than a tiny handful oftypographic errors and that, in a book of this complexity, is a tribute to the quality of

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the copy-editing. We are presented with an invaluable biographical appendix, vital indealing with often polemical works that record a radical movement, its struggle with itsopponents and its dealings with the institutions of legal and social control as well as therepresentatives of military force. Anyone who has worked with the elusive informationout of which such biographical detail has often to be culled will appreciate the skillinvolved in the generation of this resource. And, again, as the editors will surely agree,much credit has to be given to the likes of Alsop and Gurney. Sabine produced no noteson his chosen texts. In the current edition there are 4,133 notes on 638 pages of text oran average of over six notes per page. This represents nothing less than a qualitativechange in how we are able to read Winstanly. Not only are there elucidations ofobscurities in his writing and language, but we are now able to map his allusions and the(predominantly Biblical) sources on which he draws, with a completeness hithertounavailable to us. So that, for example, Sabine’s assurance that Winstanley’s resort toscripturally-backed argument ‘was never . . . more than the acceptance of what was at thetime a conventional form of argument’ will not stand up against the density of the latter’sscriptural allusions.

The biographical appendix gives some detail on 90 individuals. Some, like OliverCromwell (to whom Winstanley dedicated The Law of Freedom) or Sir Thomas Fairfax(with whom Winstanley had some contact during the diggings) are too well known toexpect much new light on them. Of the rest, 73, identifiable as Diggers, are mentionedin the tracts or in other documentation. For 32 of these there is no information beyondtheir names; for a further 15 no information beyond either an indictment, a taxassessment or the record of an oath (usually the Engagement) sworn. So that, ourbiographical information remains minimal for 64% (47) of the Diggers for whom wehave entries. We can ascribe some social status to most of the remaining 26. As well asseveral on poor relief (at least temporarily), they include a labourer, two artisans, ayeoman, a warrener, a maltster, a draper, a baker, two minor gentry (one with royalistconnections) and an attorney. Amongst them were five officeholders.What is reinforcedhere is something that we already knew from the research findings of the last quarter ofa century.The Diggers were a socially diverse group, representative of no particular class.Of the nine opponents of the Diggers examined in the biographical appendix, six wereofficeholders, three MPs, one a baronet, two manorial lords, one a sheep farmer, andothers a publican, an impropriator/member of the minor gentry and a carpenter.This istoo small a sample to make much of but, again, its diversity is suggestive. Admittedly, thesample is restricted to Winstanley’s writings and the immediate reaction to them, butwhy, for one of the most disturbing and, in a social sense, threatening political move-ments of the day, do we have so few of its opponents on record?

To what extent, then, does the new edition and its apparatus represent a breakthrough,or is it a consolidation of more recently received wisdom? It is at its strongest indocumenting Winstanley’s use of scripture and the patience that has gone into this isrichly rewarding. If one takes an early work like The Mysterie of God (1648) the scripturalallusions average four per page. That average remains roughly constant until the latework, The Law of Freedom (1652) where it drops to just over one per page.The range andnature of Winstanley’s use of the Bible would repay further systematic analysis but, at firstglance, it appears to cover a wide range of the books of both the New and OldTestaments.Would the pattern of his direct quotation of scripture reveal a more selective

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pattern of dependence? The editors’ introduction identifies Winstanley as possessed of anoriginal, radical theology derived from an ‘idiosyncratic use of the Bible’. But is it rathera case of Winstanley’s reading and exposition of the radical potential inherent in a literaland typological reading of the Bible? In other words, having slipped the leash of clericalcontrol, does he simply exploit both the direct and metaphorical applications typical ofprotestant literalism, of sermons heard and tracts read, to effects that the clergy wouldhave suppressed if only they had had the means? A collage of not-too-hard-to-findscriptural texts, applied directly to contemporary society and history, unveiled scripture’sradical potential, just as an alternative assemblage might have revealed the reverse. Theinversions of meek and mighty, rich and poor, the typologies of Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau,Moses/Abraham, Israel/Egypt, the millennialism, the inviolability of covenant/contract,the dependence of salvation upon love of your enemies, or distributing one’s property tothe poor, were all central to Winstanley’s politics, but to call it a radical theology is,perhaps, a miscategorisation. Out of a collage of scriptural texts Winstanley was able toconstruct a radical handbook just as others put together manifestoes of republican orregicidal justification. And the bonus was that they could clothe their ‘radicalisms’ in thevivid, powerful language and incident of the authorised version. Can we know howWinstanley read scripture? We ought to be able to distinguish the moments when hedeparts from scriptural warrant. Could we discern a pattern in those moments and whatwould such a pattern tells us? Nevertheless, as the editors remind us, we should alwaysbe careful not to under-estimate the hold of scripture. His anticlericalism, his eventualimpatience with words in favour of action, so critical to the start of the digging project,also had Biblical warrant.

The introduction offers and delivers a great deal but in the end it offers more than itdelivers and in some respects delivers too little. High claims have been made forWinstanley’s literary standing. Here we are told that, as a non-fiction prose writer, hecompares well with Donne, Bacon, Milton, Marvell and Bunyan.The four pages allowedfor the elaboration of Winstanley’s literary achievement are clearly insufficient to sub-stantiate the validity of such ranking. On the other hand, while we are told that hefrequently takes a ‘positive view of authority’, his recurrent interest in the legality of suchauthority is barely explored.The whole question of Winstanley and legal discourse criesout for acknowledgement and it brings his writing closer to the mainstream of the‘parliamentary revolution’. He constantly invokes the Rump’s legislation of 1649, abol-ishing kingly government and declaring England a Free State, or the parliamentaryenacted oaths of the Solemn League and Covenant and the Engagement. The diggingitself begins with an assertion of legality and is, of course, met with its counter assertion.As an officer of the law, both before and after his radical moment of 1648–52,Winstanleyposes the question as to whether the law, like the Bible, had, in the face of social andconstitutional breakdown, ‘radical’ potential. One only has to note the frequency of hisappeals to the notions of contract and equity to discern the beginnings of an answer.Inevitably, some questions remain unanswered by introductions of this type.What wouldhave been helpful, however, is more guidance on the difficult questions (the ‘route thatremains mysterious’ of Winstanley’s transition to religious heterodoxy, his persistentattempts to locate his activities and ideas not on the radical fringes but in the mainstreamof the revolution, or the origins of, and the transitions of style and substance involved inarriving at, the Law of Freedom). A danger with the pulling together of the ‘complete

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works’ in an edition of this type is that, in reading them as a whole, our reading becomeseven more divorced from the manner in which they were read by contemporaries. Inother words, immediate contextualisation and some sense of how individual tracts mighthave been read by contemporaries is invaluable. It is also, perhaps, symptomatic that it iseasier to recover information on the possible dating of individual tracts in Sabine thanin the present edition.

But these are carping criticisms.We should be grateful for this up-to-date clarificationand standardisation of Winstanley’s texts and the enormous labour that has gone intoclarifying his language, sources and social context. No doubt some reviewers will jib atthe price. But, if you get what you pay for and given that the only purchasers are goingto be libraries and well-heeled academics, might it not have been better to have charged£20 more and put the massive annotation at the foot of the page rather than at the endof each text?

COLIN DAVISUniversity of East Anglia

How Bedfordshire Voted, 1685–1735: The Evidence of Local Poll Books. Volume 2:1716–1735. Edited by James Collett-White. (Publications of the BedfordshireHistorical Record Society, 87.) Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for BedfordshireHistorical Record Society. 2008. xviii, 321 pp. £25.00. ISBN 9780851550732.

Poll books are fascinating documents because they provide real data of how the elec-torate voted. By comparison the modern psephologist is ill-served, having to gleaninformation from exit polls and surveys of opinion, which are susceptible to muchgreater margins of error. Poll books provided contemporaries with a record which couldbe copied and reorganised to facilitate analysis by electoral agents, whether to assist in anelection petition to the house of commons, or to provide the basis for future electoralplanning and campaigning by identifying supporters and opponents. In this volume,the editor helpfully indicates the form of the original in the section introducing eachpoll book.

This book is the second volume of two, which together constitute a complete run ofevidence for elections between 1685 and 1735, in the county and borough of Bedford,the only two constituencies in that county. It is an attractive volume to peruse, andcontains all the information one might require from a poll book on which to base ananalysis of local politics.

However, to form a full picture of events, and to interpret the information containedin the poll books, requires more than just the votes cast and here the book falls downin not referring to the History of Parliament volumes of the period, or to the CommonsJournals, except for two footnotes in the introduction to volume 1, pages xxvi–xxvii.Theeditor’s failure to use these two sources is most apparent in his analysis of the 1727 pollfor the borough, where he fails to note that the ‘John Brace’ standing at the election wasJohn Thurloe Brace, the member for the borough 1715–22 and 1725–7. This is com-pounded by his commentary which fails to note that Brace was returned at all and states

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that Samuel Ongley (not as stated Sir Samuel) was unseated. In fact, Orlebar and Bracewere returned. Ongley and Metcalfe petitioned on 2 February 1728 against the returnof John Orlebar and ‘John Thurloe Brace’, with a supporting petition on 14 Februaryfrom some of the voters in Bedford. The committee of elections reported on 16 April1728 and, following that, Orlebar and Metcalfe were declared duly elected, Brace nothaving offered any evidence in his defence and Ongley being declared unable to sit byvirtue of his office in the customs service.

Other points which may have been picked up by further research would have revealedthat a list compiled by the 3rd earl of Sunderland in 1722, suggested Brace’s replacementby George Huxley, thus helping to explain the all whig contest. The reviewer has alsomanaged to identify ‘Francis Brace’, the partner of John Thurloe Brace in 1722, asprobably his brother, Francis (1690–1724), an identification which escaped the Historyof Parliament because of a reference in Thurloe’s State Papers, volume vii, page xix, whichmisprinted his date of death as 1721, before the election, when, in fact, he died in 1724.Further points to note are that the petition of February 1729 (discussed on pages 166–7)on the turnpike does not appear to have been presented to the house of commons. Inthe introduction to the 1731 election (p. 167) Charles, Lord Bruce is stated to be thebrother of the 2nd earl of Ailesbury, when he was his son.

The plates between pages 174 and 175 are of very fine quality. Unfortunately, thecaption at the bottom of plate 5 does not match the document reproduced, which is apetition from the aldermen and common council complaining in general terms ofcorrupt practices in the 1727 election, which was never presented to the house ofcommons and so has survived in the borough archives, and not one relating to the SouthSea Company. Also, it may have been useful to point out in the caption to plate 9, thatdespite the tenor of the letter reproduced, Sir Roger Burgoyne was returned unopposedin the by-election when it was held in February 1735.

The short analytical sections, which set the national scene and which preface eachsection, again fail to take cognizance of the work of the History of Parliament,particularly the survey of the 1690–1715 volumes written by D.W. Hayton (for manyyears a resident of Ampthill) with its comprehensive coverage of the unreformedelectoral system.

Despite these criticisms, the Bedfordshire poll books can tell us a great deal. Manydifferent factors went into producing a given result. Cross-voting might have beenrelatively rare, but it was often crucial in determining which candidates were returned toparliament. This was particularly true when three candidates offered themselves forelection. For example, in the county contest of 1722, the Hon. Charles Leigh topped thepoll, but he was able to win the election only because of his ability to attract 287 doublevotes with William Hillersden (whom he beat by only 101 votes), and 163 with SirRowland Alston, bt (the other man returned, whom he beat by 51 votes). Leigh’simpressive tally of 743 plumpers was only 62.3% of his total vote.The tables at the end ofthe book, meanwhile, detailing voting according to hundred and, especially, that detailingthem by parish, may prove useful should someone wish to undertake a rudimentaryanalysis of the relationship of landholding to voting, as pioneered by Stephen Baskervilleand his team for Cheshire, 1701–34 in Parliamentary History, xii (1993), 126–42.

The run of poll books published in these volumes has the value of collecting all theraw material in one place. Other counties may have similar runs of poll books, such as

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Cheshire, but rarely are they as accessible.The Bedfordshire Historical Record Society isto be congratulated for this achievement.

STUART HANDLEYHistory of Parliament

Radicalism, Reform and National Identity in Scotland, 1820–1833. By GordonPentland. (Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series.) Wood-bridge: The Boydell Press. 2008. xi, 234 pp. £50.00. ISBN 9780861932993.

A notable feature of the renaissance in British political history has been the seriousconsideration devoted to events outside England. Gordon Pentland’s important newstudy of Scottish politics, religion and society locates events north of the border in widernarratives of nationalism, politics and identity in the ‘age of reform’; in the process, hedemonstrates how much is revealed by multi-national perspectives.

On 17 July 1832, the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act increased Scotland’selectorate by 1,400% to 65,000. It has long been recognized that Scotland’s politicalrepresentation was in greater need of reform than its southern neighbour. Discontent withthe unrepresentative state of the system, the creation of fictitious votes, the operation of the‘Dundas Despotism’ and the co-opting powers by which burgh representatives nominatedtheir successors were only the most pressing of many areas which reformers sought tochange. Pentland argues that, during the 1820s, these demands were increasingly articu-lated within a ‘constitutionalist idiom’, after Scotland’s brief flirtation with the massplatform between 1815 and the (short-lived) ‘Insurrection’of 1820.Rather than bequeath-ing a ‘legacy of violent nationalist resistance’, Scotland’s ‘RadicalWar’ was the precursor ofa flexible constitutionalism, through which ‘diverse ideologies and approaches to politicalreform’ could be articulated by elite and populace alike (p. 41). The period of ‘LiberalToryism’ (1820–7) was thus received positively north of the border and Pentland makesinteresting observations on the good standing which Peel enjoyed, in Scotland, as a resultof his careful handling of judicial and church patronage as home secretary. However, theterms ‘liberal’ and ‘reform’ embraced a diversity of campaign issues including reform of laypatronage in the kirk and the abolition of slavery. The barriers between ‘political’ and‘religious’ reforms were thus more porous than has previously been recognized.

Even more important developments emerged from the ‘constitutional revolution’ of1827–9. The Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and catholic emancipation over-turned the arguments of defenders of the Scottish political system and, in O’Connell’sCatholic Association, gave reformers an important new campaigning model to emulate.The argument that the articles of the 1707 Union could not be altered was also weakenedby the government’s decision to deprive 200,000 Irish county voters of the franchise as acounter-balance to emancipation:‘the idea that the variegated franchises of Britain createda complex but perfect system of representation, which enjoyed the prescription of ages’,was thereby destroyed (p. 69).This undeniably affected the battle for parliamentary reformafter 1830. The so-called ‘Patriotic’ argument maintained that ‘while the unreformedrepresentation had been beyond the wit of man, full of anomalies and not reducible to any

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theory, it had been perfect in its practical results’ (p. 109); not least, in assuring Scotland’sunprecedented commercial prosperity and enlightened civilization. Francis Jeffrey, theveteran campaigner for Scottish political reform (who emerges, with Henry Cockburn, asthe twin heroes of Pentland’s narrative), effectively demolished this argument in parlia-mentary debate, arguing that Scottish commercial prosperity presupposed, rather thanclosed off, the need for political change:‘Scotland must enlarge [its] political institutions inorder for progress to be maintained’. Reformers pursued the case for change in massmeetings, petitions and the press using a constitutionalist language which accommodatedboth ‘anglicising discourse’ and ‘emulation of English practices’, couching support ‘in termsof gaining access to English liberties that had been denied [them]’ (pp. 118, 135). Episodesfrom English and Scottish history were thus combined to place reformers in a sharednarrative of British liberty: Magna Carta was evoked alongside the covenanters, Hampden,Sidney and Robert the Bruce. Scotland’s ‘indigenous narratives of resistance and struggle’(p. 155) came to the fore in October 1831 and May 1832, when the success of thelegislation was jeopardised by high political manœuvring.Whilst British reformers voicedsupport for ‘The Bill, the whole Bill and nothing but the Bill’, the distinctively Scottishmaxim of ‘a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull together’ (p. 183) reflected a sense ofconcerted action. Here is some corroboration of Pentland’s wider thesis that the ‘interac-tion of two identities could alter the content of both’ (p. 195); although the evidencepresented here suggests that this was stronger on the Scottish than on the English side.

In May 1831, the existing Scottish representation in the Commons split 24 to 21 infavour of the whigs’ reform measure but it was the extent, rather than the principle, ofthe legislation which was increasingly at issue; in particular, the part relating to redis-tribution. Scotland retained 30 county seats after the Reform Act, Scotland’s eightadditional MPs all going to the boroughs – a victory for those who sought to protectthe landed interest from excessive redistribution to the burghs. Reformers’ hopes offurther changes to burgh representation, the church and the corn laws met with mixedsuccess, after 1832, with politics oriented around religious, as much as partisan, affilia-tions.Thus, what Pentland calls Scotland’s ‘peculiar experience of reform’ (p. 192) servedto reinforce its distinctive position in the Union (based on its separate kirk and legalinstitutions) whilst simultaneously promoting the means of strengthening the advantageswhich derived from it. Whilst the Scottish political elite saw reform as the means bywhich to extend the benefits of the Union, the campaign to secure it educated thepopulace in the process of political organisation and mass mobilisation.

RICHARD GAUNTUniversity of Nottingham

Thomas Hare and Political Representation in Victorian Britain. By F.D. Parsons.(Studies in Modern History.) Basingstoke: Palgrave. 2009. x, 287 pp. £55.00.ISBN 9780230221994.

Thomas Hare, who lived from 1806 to 1891, was a barrister, reformer and inspectorof charities, who won an international reputation as an advocate of proportional

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representation. In a succession of books and articles, Hare laid the intellectual founda-tions for the single transferable vote, which he believed would protect the representationof the educated classes, provide a truer representation of public opinion and raise themoral standard of elections. John Stuart Mill was so impressed by Hare’s proposals thathe incorporated them into his own writings, and he brought the scheme beforeparliament in the reform debates of 1866–7.

Hare has been largely neglected by historians, except as an influence upon Mill. YetHare was a serious thinker in his own right, as Floyd Parsons demonstrates in the firstfull study of Hare’s work. Building on 30 years of careful research, Parsons re-establishesHare as an eminent Victorian; he guides the reader with commendable lucidity througha thicket of competing electoral systems. The result offers some important insightsinto Victorian politics, notably the continuing importance after 1832 of debates about‘virtual’ and ‘personal’ representation. As such, his study will be welcomed by historiansof proportional representation in particular and of Victorian reform debates moregenerally.

The book is not, however, without drawbacks. It is excessively narrative, and weigheddown with far too much quotation.As the proponent of a new idea, in a political culturethat was notoriously inhospitable to ‘novelties’, Hare was forced to set out his ideas againand again, in a series of articles that varied little over several decades. This was goodtactics, but following these productions one after another makes for wearying reading.The constant cycle of quotations quickly becomes tiresome, and operates to the exclu-sion of a sustained analysis. It is not clear, for example, which of the many authorities onwhom Hare drew were real influences on his thought, and which were simply referents,designed to expand the audience for his ideas.There is little indication whether – or howfar – Hare’s ideas changed over time, or where he stood on the political spectrum.Readers who wish to set Hare within an intellectual genealogy, or who are interested inthe peculiar character of his liberalism, are going to have to do a great deal of work forthemselves.

Parsons states at the outset that his book is not ‘a biography’, though he acknowledgesthat ‘the approach is biographical’ (p. 2). This sets up a tension within the book that isnever quite resolved. Chapter 1, on ‘The Life and Works of Thomas Hare’, is overtlybiographical, and contains interesting material on everything from the government ofIndia to the reform of endowments. Yet the author says little about the relationship ofthese interests to ‘personal representation’, and we rarely hear of them again. Hare himselfis largely absent from the final section, which looks more broadly at the campaign forproportional representation before the Third Reform Act. This is a pity, as there areevident connections between Hare’s interests that could shed light on his constitutionalwritings; and they certainly help to explain Hare’s affinity with Mill.

If the book is not quite a biography, nor is it wholly persuasive as ‘a study of therelationship between Victorian political and intellectual history’ (p. 2). By the end of thebook, we are well-acquainted with the arguments for and against Hare’s system; but thisdoes not of itself explain their purchase on political actors. For Mill, the problem laydeep in British political culture, with its ‘silly aversion . . . to anything new in politics’.1

He also thought Hare lacking in tactical nous, complaining that he ‘has much to learnin the art of presenting his discoveries’ (p. 81). Even Mill baulked at Hare’s suggestion ofa parliamentary committee to investigate the best means of ‘liberating and stimulating

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individual thought and action’.2 Hare’s enthusiasm for foreign precedents may also havebeen counter-productive, rubbing as it did against the ingrained chauvinism of Britishconstitutionalism.

Parsons has some suggestive comments on the role of party in this debate, particularlywith the rise of the caucus. He offers a thoughtful comparison between Hare andGladstone on this subject (pp. 56–7), and concludes robustly that ‘the party systemdetermined the electoral system’ (p. 189). Yet the argument could be further developed.There is little discussion of the intellectual case for party, to which most of the leadingfigures in British politics were committed. The argument, as Disraeli put it, that ‘partygovernment and parliamentary government were identical’ was shared, to varyingdegrees, by Gladstone, Russell and Derby; and it posed a serious obstacle to any systemintended to diminish the influence of party.3

The final sentence offers a summary of the general argument: ‘This high politics ofparliamentary reform in Victorian Britain as emphasized by Maurice Cowling wasinformed by the rhetoric of public debate which was influenced by the writings ofThomas Hare on political representation’ (p. 190). It is not easy to disentangle what thismeans, and herein lies the chief weakness of the book. Crowded out by exposition, theanalysis is insufficiently developed, resulting in sometimes breathless and opaque con-clusions. None the less, Parsons has made a useful contribution to the history ofproportional representation, and has shed interesting light on an important thinker.

ROBERT SAUNDERSSt John’s College Oxford

1 St John’s College, Oxford, Hare Papers, MS 356: Mill to Hare, 30 Dec. 1867.2 St John’s College, Oxford, Hare Papers, MS 356: Mill to Hare, 11 Jan. 1866.3 A. Hawkins, The Forgotten Prime Minister: The Fourteenth Earl of Derby (2 vols, Oxford, 2006–8), ii, 229.

The Apprenticeship of a Mountaineer: Edward Whymper’s London Diary, 1855–1859.Edited by Ian Smith. (London Record Society, 43.) London. 2008. xxvi, 241 pp.£25.00. ISBN 9780900952432.

The London Record Society has published the teenage diary of Edward Whymper, whobecame famous for his dramatic first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. The title isaccurate only in the most pedantic sense, for there is nothing about mountaineeringhere, unless one counts a brief account of a foolhardy attempt to climb Beachy Head.Whymper took up Alpine adventure in the year after this diary volume ends. These,rather, were years of apprenticeship in the family wood engraving firm in South London,at a time when high-quality engravers were much in demand.Whymper’s father was wellknown in London artistic circles, and this was a prosperous business for a young man, inwhich Edward earned good wages and had legitimate expectations of professionalsuccess. The diary evidence is of a piece with the driven, self-reliant figure known tomountaineering historians. In 1857 he asked his diary who had not had ideas of beinga great person, ‘perhaps Prime Minister, or at least a millionaire’ (p. 120). Leaving schoolat 14 years of age, he applied himself, in Smilesian fashion, to maximise his chances of

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fame and wealth. On 27 April 1855: ‘I am fifteen years old. Made a resolution to get upearlier in the mornings, that being one of the best ways to success’ (p. 11). For exercisehe would walk 25 miles in an afternoon, or enjoy a ‘good bathe’ in the sea in October.‘Who will deny that a day of pleasure is not more wearisome and tiring, than a day ofour ordinary work?’ (p. 46). Indeed, French longevity was shorter than English becausethey had too much time for pleasure. When he was aged 14 years, he recorded withpleasure his ‘first deposit . . . in the savings bank’ (p. 5). Young Whymper attended veryregularly at Maze Pond Baptist Chapel near London Bridge, where his family had a pew.Many of the preachers were found wanting, not least Mr Clarke, who dropped his ‘h’’s:‘his pronunciation is vile, and yet he has passed his Bachelor of Arts examination at theUniversity of London’ (p. 119). For Edward, a major domestic political issue wasWalmsley’s attempt to allow the main museums and galleries to open on Sundays, whichappalled him. Indeed he felt sinful on the one occasion that he took the omnibus toCamden Road chapel on a Sunday, encouraging the driver to work then. He also hadno time for the ‘mob’ protests in Hyde Park against Grosvenor’s Sunday Trading Bill of1855.This was part of a more general dislike of radicalism: when he attended a politicalmeeting to heckle the ‘ignorant, radical’ Doulton in Lambeth at the 1859 election, it was‘the first time I was ever in a theatre’ (p. 164).Whymper was not exactly a Conservative:he did not welcome the premiership of that ‘deadly old Tory’ Derby in 1858 (p. 129).Rather he was a critical, rigorous young man who had few illusions about the hypocrisyand puffery of the world. He repeatedly criticized the flaccid handling of the CrimeanWar, aristocratic ineptitude and that ‘little humbug’ Lord John Russell (p. 88), or, indeed,any humbug. In the flesh, Napoleon III and Eugenie looked ‘remarkably jaded’ (p. 10);the Big Ben clock tower was ‘ugly’ and the National Gallery ‘disgraceful’ (p. 39); herevelled in the difficulty of moving the celebrated Great Eastern more than a few feet inNovember 1857, at an immense cost to shareholders. The craze for Macaulay he couldnot fathom;‘the public are in a rare way to get any new books and when they get them,they are generally disappointed’ (p. 37). He had a particular relish for gruesome railwayaccidents and sensational murders. It is all the more striking then, that Tom Brown’sSchooldays had such a positive impact on him. ‘I previously, ignorantly, hated [Arnold’s]name, I shall now revere it’ (p. 114).

J.P. PARRYPembroke College, Cambridge

The Party of Patriotism: The Conservative Party and the First World War. By NigelKeohane. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2010. x, 250 pp. £60.00. ISBN 9780754663249.

Twenty years have passed since Ewen Green memorably described the ConservativeParty as ‘the Cinderella of Edwardian historiography’.1 Whilst studies of Edwardian andinter-war Conservatism have subsequently flourished, scholars have devoted significantlyless attention to how the party’s organisation fared during the First World War. NigelKeohane’s book seeks to correct this anomaly, integrating the war years into the story ofhow the Conservatives went from electoral crisis in the 1900s to apparent hegemony in

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the 1930s. The range of sources that are utilised to provide this survey of the wartimeparty is certainly impressive, and no less than 92 constituency organisation records areanalysed, along with a range of manuscript sources and contemporary publications.

Keohane sets himself the task of exploring how the experience of war transformed theConservatives’ rhetorical appeals, and successive chapters explore the key challenges thatthe party faced: the immediate conduct of the war, coalition government, a radicalisedIrish population, an organised labour movement which grew increasingly assertive in itsdemands, and the need for electoral reform and state intervention. The picture thatemerges from this book is of a Conservative Party which proved remarkably effective indealing with the immediate challenges of the war. Whilst the party remained dividedover Ireland’s future in 1918 Unionism no longer appeared to be the destabilising forcethat it had been in the pre-war years, when the Conservatives had flirted with the ideaof armed resistance to a home rule settlement (pp. 90, 96). The party was also able tocynically shape the electoral reforms of 1918 along largely Conservative lines. Whilstleaders’ expectations that the serviceman’s franchise would counteract the growinginfluence of the trade unions may have proved illusory (pp. 135–7), the Conservativesappear to have benefited from the Boundary Commission’s redrawing of the politicalmap (pp. 148–52). Above all, the party was aided by its ability to develop a unitedplatform in support of the war, in contrast to the parties of the left.The challenges posedby the ‘radical right’ only served to strengthen mainstream Conservative resolve to rallyaround the coalition (pp. 50–56, 102). Many aspects of the story which Keohane tells arenot particularly new, in particular the reading of the coalition settlement resembles thatprovided by Ewen Green (p. 65), but his achievement is to offer a more detailed andnuanced presentation of the wartime party than have previous authors.

Whilst Keohane is largely convincing in arguing that the experience of war helpedunite the Conservatives around a common patriotic platform, his claim that wartimedevelopments laid the foundations for post-war electoral success seems less well substan-tiated. Keohane argues that the Conservatives sought to construct patriotic discourses toward off the growing threat of socialism during the war (p. 115). It is subsequentlyinferred that this strategy laid the foundation for the anti-socialist politics which RossMcKibbin has seen as being at the root of the Conservatives’ inter-war ascendancy, withvoters being appealed to through propaganda which sought to present Labour as‘anti-patriotic’ (pp. 4, 128). Yet Keohane provides us with little sense of how, or indeedwhether, the Conservatives’ wartime languages of patriotism maintained a popularresonance when the peace came. Labour’s ability to win a series of breakthroughs at the1919 municipal elections, on the back of low turnouts, suggests that the electoraladvantages which the Conservatives gained from the war were vulnerable to the chal-lenge of alternative discourses.

Part of the problem here is that Keohane’s picture of grass-roots politics relies heavilyon local party records. Constituency organisations met rarely during the war so theirminute books tend to offer a reaction to recent events rather than a continuouscommentary on the war effort. Moreover, whilst these records provide us with a goodunderstanding of the mentalities of party activists, they offer us little sense of the party’srelationship with the wider public or of its participation in the activities of government-supported organisations such as the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee or theNational War Aims Committee (NWAC). Keohane repeats Brock Millman’s ill-founded

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claim that the NWAC ‘promoted a crude strategy of jingoistic violence to upset pacifistgatherings’ (p. 109). And yet, the NWAC avoided such radical right tactics, as DavidMonger’s study, which draws heavily on the local press, demonstrates. Thousands ofConservative activists participated in the activities of this organisation, which promoteda democratic peace and sought to refashion British patriotism along non-partisan lines.2

Keohane’s study demonstrates that British Conservatism remained a vital force duringthe First World War, but if we are to develop a fuller understanding of how the partyrefashioned its relationship with the public during the conflict we need to move beyondthe constituency organisation and understand how party activists participated in thewider war effort.

DAVID THACKERAYQueen’s College, Oxford

1 H.H. Green, ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’, Twentieth Century British History, ii (1991), 68–9.2 David Monger, Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee andCivilian Morale (forthcoming).

The Failure of a Dream:The Independent Labour Party from Disaffiliation to World WarII. By Gidon Cohen. London: I.B. Tauris. 2007. x, 262 pp. £59.50. ISBN9781845113001.

At the beginning of this valuable study of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the1930s, Gidon Cohen observes that the ILP’s story has often been used as a cautionarytale to discourage efforts to create a party to the left of Labour. The ILP’s infamousdecision to disaffiliate from the Labour Party in 1932 has generally been seen as aquixotic act of suicide that precipitated the demise of a distinguished British politicalbrand.Those who seek a more leftward course than entertained by the Labour leadershiphave found the apparent futility of the ILP’s disaffiliation to be a surprisingly tenaciousrhetorical trope. I can recall seeing that steadfast Blairite, John Reid, chastise a 1999Labour conference fringe meeting with a paraphrase of Aneurin Bevan’s stinging retortto Jennie Lee as she left Labour with the ILP:‘If it’s purity and impotence that you want,then join a nunnery. Don’t join the Labour Party.’

If Cohen confirms nothing else about the traditional account of the ILP’s trajectory,then it is that purity and impotence were indeed among the leading characteristics of theILP in the 1930s. None the less, Cohen disagrees with the conventional view of theILP’s disaffiliation as an emotional spasm (to use another of Bevan’s choice rebukes).There was logic at work in the ILP’s departure, he argues. Strictly speaking, indeed, therewere logics: subsequent divisions within the party can be traced to the fact that divergentreasoning led to the same conclusion. Some members of the ILP sought to break fromLabour to develop a more revolutionary socialism. Others took a stand on the narrowerconstitutional principle that ILP MPs should be bound by the decisions of the ILP’sannual conference and not by the standing orders of the Parliamentary Labour Party.

This analysis of the complexities of the disaffiliation decision is indicative of Cohen’soverall approach. He aims to transcend the clichéd images of the ILP in this period –

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those hardy perennials of over-exuberant Red Clydeside radicalism and sandal-wearingmiddle-class socialist eccentricity – by giving a more sophisticated account of whatexactly went wrong after 1932.The result is a subtle, probing study, written in clear andcompelling prose, and displaying a mastery of the sources unequalled elsewhere.

Cohen’s method draws on that pioneered by David Howell in his seminal book,British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888–1906 (Manchester, 1983). Inparticular, Cohen conceptualises the ILP in the 1930s in the same way as Howellanalysed the party’s late-19th-century forebears: as struggling in various ways to createpolitical space in the face of formidable structural constraints.The metaphor of politicalspace is understood expansively, involving geographical, philosophical, organisational andelectoral dimensions. Cohen explores each of these dimensions in thematic, but over-lapping, chapters.What new light does this approach shed on this familiar story? Cohenaccepts that the ILP could never have replaced the Labour Party as the dominant leftparty in Britain, but he suggests that this is not the correct metric to adopt as themeasure of the party’s success or failure.The British left of the 1930s, Cohen argues, wasfractured and pluralistic: sufficient space existed for a decent-sized non-communist leftparty that would have acted as both a conscience and a junior partner for the LabourParty. Had the ILP been less factionalised and divided, had it possessed more effectiveleadership, it would have declined far less dramatically and could have played this role.Cohen’s emphasis is, therefore, on the agency of the ILP; on its failure to adapt to achallenging domestic and international environment.

To make this case, Cohen assesses in detail the contribution made by individuals,institutions and ideas in retarding the ILP’s progress in this period. Key individuals –notably the party’s leadership – were ineffective at identifying strategic goals and holdingthe party together in support of them. For all its political obscurity, the ILP of this periodcertainly played host to an outstanding cast of characters.To name only a few of the mostprominent, figures such as James Maxton, Fenner Brockway, C.L.R. James, John Middle-ton Murray, Jennie Lee and, eventually, even George Orwell were all associated with theparty in one capacity or another and make an appearance in Cohen’s account. Notablylacking from this list, however, is anyone who might be described as a savvy andpragmatic politician. Maxton was inspirational and charismatic, but proved incapable ofkeeping the party together and strategically pushing its interests forward.

Deficient leadership was compounded by weaknesses in the ILP’s institutions. Theparty reformed its constitution in 1934, sidelining the ILP’s traditional governing body,the National Administrative Council, in favour of a smaller executive committee, and aninner executive (IE) that was composed of only three or four members. These reformswere undertaken under the influence of revolutionary socialism, with a view to bringingthe party’s constitution in line with the principles of democratic centralism.The creationof the IE apparently anticipated the party being declared illegal and forced underground.In an appealing irony, the IE’s meetings were, in practice, held at the house of commons,presumably because this was the most convenient venue for a body that was, from 1935,exclusively composed of the ILP’s MPs (Maxton, John McGovern and CampbellStephen). This institutional reform, therefore, diminished internal party democracy andhanded a great deal of discretionary power over party policy and strategy to a smallgroup of MPs. At the same time, the party’s activist and support base was progressivelyweakened by a series of damaging factional disputes. Ideologically, the party was split

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between a broadly Marxist outlook – which to many implied alliance or integration withthe Communist Party – and the ILP’s traditional language of ethical socialism.The ILP’sbase in this period was, therefore, a mixture of communist sympathisers, old-style ethicalsocialists and Trotskyists. Not unexpectedly, this mix produced highly combustible inter-nal party debates. Secessions and expulsions duly followed, to such an extent that italmost comes as a surprise at the end of the book to learn that anyone apart fromMaxton was still in the party by 1939.

As Cohen shows, these divisions played out in a tough domestic electoral environment– the ILP had to carve out space for itself between Labour and the Communist Party –and during the rise of fascism abroad. A more disciplined ILP could probably havemaintained greater domestic electoral space, since at the time of disaffiliation the partyremained electorally competitive in certain traditional ILP areas (notably Glasgow andBradford). But the party’s divisions prevented it from maintaining and building on areasof strength – for example, opposition to the growing influence of revolutionary socialismled to the disaffiliation of a large chunk of the Lancashire ILP in 1934. Internationalaffairs compounded the misery as the rise of fascism split the party in different directionsover Abyssinia, the Spanish civil war and Munich. In particular, the debate over Abyssiniarevealed how parlous and factionalised the party had become: communist sympathiserstook the Soviet line in backing the imposition of League of Nations sanctions, whileC.L.R. James led a crusading anti-colonial faction that demanded separate ‘workers’sanctions’. Both sides were overruled by the ILP MPs, who were able to impose theirwill on the party via the IE and a thinly-veiled threat of resignation from Maxton.TheMPs took a quasi-pacifist and, thus, non-interventionist position, dismissing the Abys-sinian dispute as merely a contest between rival imperial powers.The ILP acquired morecredible anti-fascist credentials by sending volunteers to fight for socialism during theSpanish civil war. The ILP contingent (including, of course, George Orwell) was alliedwith its Spanish sister party, POUM, and opposed the Stalinist takeover of the republic.But the strain of quasi-pacifism among the ILP MPs subsequently led them to voiceparliamentary approval of the Munich agreement.The party then opposed the outbreakof war in 1939 on the grounds that it, too, was an imperialist conflict.

Cohen’s study concludes on this inglorious note. This is slightly surprising, since thebook would have been nicely rounded out by taking the story of the ILP up to 1945,or at least by outlining the chief wartime developments in an afterword. As the bookstands, the reader is left somewhat unsure about what happened next and how it fits intoCohen’s argument.This aside, however, Cohen makes a persuasive case that the ILP was,to some extent, the author of its own decline. One point that perhaps deserves moreattention than Cohen gives it – though it is implicitly raised at certain junctures – is howfar the electoral system posed a significant structural obstacle to the ILP’s electoralsuccess. Since the ILP found itself competing with the Labour Party for council andparliamentary seats it was always vulnerable to the accusation that it was splitting theLabour vote. Surely first past the post must have played a role in constraining the ILP’selectoral space? If this was, indeed, a more important factor than Cohen credits, then aslightly different moral emerges for those seeking a successful party to the left of Labour.As elections for the devolved assemblies of Scotland and Wales have recently shown, amore proportional electoral system results in a more fissile party system. Proportionalrepresentation seems to be a necessary ingredient for pressurising Labour from the left.

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But the implosion of the Scottish Socialist Party also shows that Cohen is correct tostipulate that party discipline and competent leadership are equally essential ingredients.In this sense, Tommy Sheridan has shown himself to be a fitting heir to Maxton.

BEN JACKSONUniversity College, Oxford

Richard Crossman:A Reforming Radical of the Labour Party. By Victoria Honeyman.London: I. B. Tauris. 2007. x, 207 pp. £30.00. ISBN 9781845115531.

Richard Crossman and the Welfare State: Pioneer of Welfare Provision and LabourPolitics in Post-War Britain. By Stephen Thornton. London: I. B.Tauris. 2009. 209pp. £49.50. ISBN 9781845118488.

Richard Crossman’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a‘politician and diarist’ and were it not for his diaries he would certainly have made muchless impact on both the contemporary public and scholars of British politics than he did.None the less, his political career is not without interest and the appearance of twomonographs on him in three years is evidence of this.

Of the two volumes, Victoria Honeyman’s discussion of Crossman is the morerounded. It is biographical but not a biography as such. Indeed the author is notablydefensive about the craft of biography, devoting considerable space in her introduction toestablishing its scholarly potential (successfully so). Despite her robust defence of thebiographical form, she does not, however, seek to provide a ‘life’ of the man along thelines of Anthony Howard’s Crossman:The Pursuit of Power (1990) – instead a singlechapter provides a potted round-up of its salient details. She finds that ‘While Crossmanhad some successes as a minister, none of his major policy works came to fruition’ (p. 7)but argues that, none the less, consideration of his political career can tell us much aboutthe internal politics of the Labour Party between 1945 and 1970.To this end, Honeymansets out to explore Crossman’s political career by focusing on three particular aspects ofit. First, she discusses Crossman’s involvement in the party’s internal fight between thosewho sought to preserve it as a self-consciously ‘socialist’ party and those revisionists whosought to transform it into a modern social democratic party. Her analysis undercutssimplistic ‘left’ versus ‘right’ distinctions and, in tracing Crossman’s path from Bevanitesocialist nationalisation to Wilsonite technocratic corporatist ‘planning’, provides furtherelucidation of the party’s ideological tensions and development in the bitter years ofopposition between 1951 and 1964. The second topic for analysis is foreign policy, notperhaps the most obvious area of Crossman’s political life to explore given his somewhatlimited engagement with foreign policy outside the arena of Israel’s development and itsimpact on the Middle East. Here, again, Crossman’s developing views on issues such asBritain’s relationship with the USA and the ways in which an independent nucleardeterrent might obviate many of Britain’s conventional military deployments andoverseas bases, are used to explore shifts in party policy more generally. Lastly, Honeymanlooks at Crossman’s role in constitutional reform, a field in which, though Crossman’s

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engagement with it was intermittent, he did actually leave a lasting legacy when, as leaderof the house of commons between 1966 and 1968 he established the beginnings of theselect committee system – something Honeyman does not really give him sufficientcredit for, choosing instead to focus more on Crossman’s failure to achieve his desiredreform of the house of lords.

Honeyman’s evaluation of Crossman is well-researched, though perhaps would havebenefited from less use of the published diaries and more engagement with Crossman’spersonal papers. She rightly identifies Crossman as an unusual politician, not leastbecause whilst he spent most of his life on the back benches his diaries created a lastingreputation for him. She argues that he was also a politician whose career can be usedeffectively to explore more general currents of thought within the left and centre-left ofLabour during the years in which he was a player. Whilst Honeyman sums him up asneither ‘a key [n]or systematic thinker on socialism’ (p. 159) she rightly notes that at anyone time his views were fairly widespread in sections of the party and the wider labourmovement.Where there were notable divergences, for example on socialism and nation-alisation, she sees these as more about style than content. Ultimately, however, her workrather supports the view that Crossman, for all his intellectual pedigree, was not much ofa thinker and that his inability to maintain focus was his great undoing. In the process,her work serves to reinforce Crossman’s reputation as a ‘progressive gadfly’ (as DavidMarquand summed him up in The Progressive Dilemma).

Whilst Crossman’s ‘gadfly’ reputation is not entirely unjustified, an alternative frame ofanalysis than that adopted by Honeyman might have provided a somewhat positiveassessment. Coincidently, just such an appraisal is provided by Stephen Thornton’s recentbook, which seeks to rescue Crossman from ‘the footnotes of Labour Party history’ andestablish him instead as a ‘pioneer of welfare provision’.The starting point for Thornton’selegantly-written and perceptive analysis is a December 1954 article by Crossman in theNew Statesman announcing ‘The end of Beveridge’, and his speech to the Labour Partyconference in 1955 in which, apparently inspired by reading Brian Abel-Smith and PeterTownsend’s New Pensions for Old, he argued that the post-war Beveridgean welfare statewas flawed, particular in relation to pensions, and that radical reform was needed. Thisprovided a springboard for him in this policy arena, for he was rapidly drafted onto anew Labour Party study group set up to examine the problem of security in old age.Theproduct of the study group’s deliberations (which were advised by the academic ‘skifflegroup’ of Richard Titmuss, Abel-Smith and Townsend) was the publication of a policydocument in 1957 entitled ‘National Superannuation: Labour’s Policy for Security inOld Age’ – more pithily summed up by Crossman, its principal champion, as ‘half-pay onretirement’.This sought to extend the benefits of private earnings-related pensions to allBritons, not just those lucky enough to be a member of a company scheme.

In its original form, national superannuation ran into the sands, most obviouslybecause the party lost the 1959 general election but also because its plans to create asubstantial state pension fund to be ‘boldly invested’ in stock markets caused it to betarred by its opponents with the brush of politically-unpopular nationalisation. However,Thornton’s study shows that, contrary to Crossman’s reputation as a gadfly, he continuedto champion the national superannuation concept, albeit in a somewhat watered-downform. His study group on old age, therefore, lived on into the ‘white heat’ era of the1960s. The concept of ‘national superannuation’ was at once diluted to bring in the

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private sector and extended to include income protection against sickness and redun-dancy, though Crossman’s study group was diverted for a while by the attractive conceptof a ‘guaranteed income’, which figured prominently in the party’s 1964 electionmanifesto. Once in power, the latter idea wilted as a result of the economic difficultiesgenerated by the commitment to defend sterling. National superannuation, however,lived on – though ultimately the party’s loss of the 1970 general election meant thatCrossman’s legislation to implement it fell. None the less, though Crossman lost interestonce the party was in opposition and his career as a minister was obviously over, hisconcept of ‘earnings-relation for all’ lived on, finally reaching the statute book with thecreation of the state earnings-related pensions scheme in 1975.

Someone who reads these two books together thus receives a rather more nuancedimpression of Crossman than is provided by each on its own. None the less, for all thegadfly tendencies highlighted by Honeyman, in pensions at least,Thornton is surely rightthat Crossman should be remembered not so much for what he achieved as a ministerbut, in his long championing of ‘national superannuation’. Here he proved to be aconsistent advocate of an idea that shaped Labour Party policy for two decades andwhich eventually, though in somewhat mutated form, served to transform the Britishwelfare system.

H. PEMBERTONUniversity of Bristol

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the english parliaments of henry vii, 1485–1504 – by p.r. cavill

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