The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron – By Tim Bale

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Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire. By Paul D. Halliday. Cambridge, MA andLondon: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2010. 502 pp. £29.95. ISBN9780674049017.

Few terms in the Anglo-American legal lexicon carry quite the weight or evoke theemotional response than do the words habeas corpus. In recent years especially, they havebecome, in the public imagination, emblematic of our legal systems, of their guaranteesagainst arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, of their guiding principles of due process. Inactual fact, the writ to which they refer (in all its forms) was deceptively simple – astraightforward instruction to a jailer, issued by one of the king’s courts (most oftenking’s bench) to produce the body of a prisoner so that the cause of his or herconfinement could be properly assessed.The writ’s reach was comprehensive. Eventually,all inferior courts and magistrates were subject to its commands, and inevitably, judgesdeliberating the underlying causes of confinement were forced to consider a range ofissues and problems that lay well beyond the particular circumstances or history of theaccused.Their primary responsibility was to regulate jailors, to resolve issues of jurisdic-tion and monitor the powers exercised by particular magistrates. But their decisions tobail, discharge or remand, inevitably reflected their understanding of – and response to– broader social problems and matters of public policy.The writ was, in a very real sense,a tool of governance and its history has cried out for just the kind of magisterial studyit receives here.

Professor Halliday’s book is, in the first instance, an extraordinary work of scholarship.His willingness to tackle the voluminous records of the court of king’s bench was initself heroic – his survey of writs of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum covered every fourth yearfrom 1502 to 1798 inclusive, and involved an analysis of nearly 2,800 cases. The text issupplemented by a very informative appendix explaining his methodology and detailingthe results, aided by a number of helpful charts and graphs. He has also provided aparticularly useful table of ‘cases cited’, organised chronologically, by name, alleged crime,detaining authority and dispensation. His research reflects an admirably-wide reading ofmanuscript and printed primary sources, as well as an enviable command of the relevantsecondary literature.

All of this is put to great purpose. This is unabashedly a ‘revisionist’ work. ProfessorHalliday is at pains to correct at least two fundamental misapprehensions.The first is thenow mythic belief that habeas corpus emerged from the conflicts of 1215 and theresolutions contained in Magna Carta as a recognized fundamental right and protectionunder the law. The provisions regarding arrest and imprisonment in that treaty wereentirely too vague to have been of much use in establishing a permanent process –depending as they did on ill-defined and unspecified conceptions of the ‘law of the land’.

Parliamentary History, Vol. 30, pt. 3 (2011), pp. 436–455

© The Parliamentary History Yearbook Trust 2011

What Magna Carta established was simply the principle of ‘lawful imprisonment’. AsProfessor Halliday clearly demonstrates, the writ itself derived, instead, directly from theroyal prerogative, a product of the king’s sacred responsibility to protect the bodies of hissubjects, of his right to summon their body from place to place, both to manage relationsbetween competing jurisdictions and, ostensibly, to assure his subjects’ safe keeping. Untilthe 17th century, it was more concerned ‘with the wrongs of jailers than the rights ofprisoners’ (p. 14).What changed in the early 17th century was that the judges of king’sbench – most notably Coke, Popham and Fleming – laid claim to that responsibility –‘captured the King’s prerogative’ – and used it to assume a general supervisory jurisdic-tion over all inferior courts and magistrates. Once that authority was firmly established,they used their power to expand the writ’s reach, allowing them to determine not justthe ‘wherefores’ of confinement, but the ‘whys’, and to determine whether the arrest andimprisonment were, indeed, justified under the law.

Justice was, in fact, the operative word. Professor Halliday’s second corrective is toinsist that the judges in habeas cases did not just enforce rules. They made judgments.Their decisions in detention cases – arising as they did from a multiplicity of jurisdic-tions, and involving an almost unimaginable range of issues and causes – required themto be flexible, creative and often remarkably compassionate. In this capacity, the king’sbench frequently resembled a court of equity, deliberately using the various stages of itsprocess to negotiate appropriate resolutions. Halliday’s discussion of the use of support-ing affidavits is especially illuminating here, but so, too, are the discussions of domesticabuse cases, and those involving both apprenticeship and impressment. As a corollary,Halliday is able to demonstrate the impact of individual justices on the process, largelyby examining their responses to particular returns, or their rates of release and remand.His point in all of this is to emphasize the critical element of judicial discretion. It wasthese men, confronting a host of disparate challenges, who collectively defined theparameters of English liberty and gave birth to the expectations of a ‘natural right’ thatbecame a part of the cultural ethos.

Ironically, the greatest challenge to their discretion would come from parliament.During the political upheavals of the mid 17th century, the judges’ work was com-promised by parliament’s own use of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and its defi-ance of established legal convention. Conversely, the later political and religiousconflicts of the post-Restoration period led parliament in the opposite direction, toplace the writ on a surer foundation (and expand its geographical reach) by passingthe Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. In fact, however, this amounted to something of alegislative ‘usurpation’. Creating a statutory authority for an existing common-law writactually made it less secure, rather than more, and complicated the judges’ workimmeasurably by making them susceptible to the vagaries of changing political for-tunes. That became clear all too quickly. Only ten years later, in 1689, parliamentsuspended habeas corpus by statute, ostensibly in order to protect the ‘safety of the state’during the crisis of the Glorious Revolution. But the new effect was to circumventthe judges’ traditional authority almost entirely by denying them the opportunity torelease those improperly detained. On this and other occasions, they were furtherconstrained by parliamentary acts of indemnity, which put errant jailers beyondthe reach of the law. Trust in judicial discretion had been sacrificed to politicalnecessity.

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Halliday’s book makes clear that those tensions were then exported ‘beyond the seas’both to Britain’s dominions and to its colonial empire. His survey of colonial commu-nities is, in fact, highly illuminating. It demonstrates the enduring power of the writ,most especially perhaps in common-law courts modeled on king’s bench created incommunities as disparate as Quebec, Ceylon, Calcutta and New South Wales, but also inthe subsequent efforts made by colonial legislatures to hem them in when publicdisorder among indigenous populations threatened colonial ambitions.

For all of the complexities of his subject (and his evident learning) Professor Hallidaypresents this material in a style that is lucid, immediately accessible and engaging. He isparticularly adept at explaining key concepts and ideas – there is, for instance, awonderful discussion of contemporary notions of ‘liberty’ – and at choosing (and thensummarizing) individual cases to illustrate particular legal problems or processes. Hisprotagonists are all vividly drawn. No doubt others will find specific issues they wishedhad been more fully addressed, but by any reasonable standard, this is a toweringachievement. It deserves the widest possible readership.

JAMES S. HART jrUniversity of Oklahoma

Parliament in Context, 1235–1707. Edited by Keith M. Brown and Alan R.MacDonald. (The History of the Scottish Parliament, 3.) Edinburgh: EdinburghUniversity Press. 2010. xvi, 286 pp. £70.00. ISBN 9780748614868.

If any historical subject is in need of saving from the condescension of posterity, theScottish parliament must be a strong contender. Once dismissed by scholars as weak andineffectual, Scotland’s parliament was invariably cited as the example of how not to bean early modern representative institution. Unicameralism made parliament susceptibleto manipulation by over-mighty magnates, who blocked the development of the proto-democratic tendencies that supposedly guaranteed the survival of its bicameral Englishcounterpart into modern times. Its procedures were highly informal and it lacked adistinctive institutional identity. Short sessions, the seeming absence of a tradition ofvigorous debate, and the existence of a steering committee that allowed the crown toram home whatever legislative agenda it wanted, meant that the Scottish parliamentcould not fulfil its primary function of holding the government to account.As late as the1970s, the whig version of Scottish history was alive and well.

Most scholars no longer rank European representative institutions according towhether they were ‘successes’ or ‘failures’. Medieval parliaments were not designed, orexpected, to hold the executive to account and few developed any such capability intothe early modern era. Far from being in conflict with monarchs, parliaments acted asanother forum where consensus and co-operation amongst socio-political elites could befostered. The Scottish Parliament Project, established in 1997 with an initial grant fromthe former Scottish Office and directed by Professor Keith Brown, has generated interestin the Scottish parliament as a conventionally European representative institution. Theproject’s main purpose was the creation of a digital, online edition of the parliamentary

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record, which would improve on the accessibility and reliability of Thomas Thomson’scumbersome 19th-century printed volumes. The digital edition is a great achievement,although I would say this, because I worked briefly for the project to help produce it.I was not involved in the accompanying series entitled The History of the ScottishParliament, the third and final instalment of which is under scrutiny here. Arguably, thisvolume ought not to be viewed as a stand-alone work, since much of what it covers isgrounded in the two preceding surveys. None the less, it serves its stated purpose as aone-volume thematic guide to people, processes and outcomes across the centuries (p.xiii). As a succinct, introductory text, it will prove invaluable for both students andresearchers, who can now refer to what will remain the major scholarly, modern accountof how the Scottish parliament functioned.

The first four chapters provide chronological overviews of the role played in parliamentby crown, nobility, clergy and burghs.All the authors have successfully provided authorita-tive surveys of the current literature on the Scottish parliament, while also flagging up themajor trends in the relationship between a given ‘stakeholder’ (p. xiii) and parliament as aninstitution. The centrality of the crown in what was, we are all now agreed, a royalinstitution ‘through and through’ (p. 1), is ably explored by Drs MacIntosh and Tanner.‘Consensus’ and ‘legitimacy’ are rightly made the lynchpins of this chapter, although it isleft to James Burns, in a richly-textured, lively essay on Scotland’s distinctive, yet thor-oughly Europeanised, political thinkers, to trace out lines of divergence on these concepts.Scotland’s medieval clerical estate seems conventionally European, too, according to DrsMcAlister and Tanner. Like neighbouring royal dynasties, the house of Stewart usedchurchmen in high political office, sought to control church patronage, and did all it couldto get its hands on that institution’s enormous wealth. Did these policies undermine theunity, authority and vigour of the church just at the moment when it needed all thesevirtues in abundance? This essay does not say.After reformation, Scotland’s clerical estatelooks rather less-conventionally European. For well over a century, its various representa-tives performed an institutional hokey-cokey as they were put in and put out of parlia-ment, generating ongoing constitutional tensions and periodic bouts of instability in theprocess.The authors do well to highlight continuities across the reformation divide, whilediscussion of the relationship between parliament and that uniquely Scottish body, thegeneral assembly of the kirk, provides welcome clarity on a complex subject.

Those already familiar with Dr MacDonald’s work on burghs and Professor Brown’son the nobility will find few surprises in a pair of informative and coherent essays thatlargely summarize arguments made in greater detail elsewhere.As the third estate, burghsdid not dominate parliament and were rarely interested in great affairs of state, butMacDonald shows that, through mutual co-operation, they became skilled at usingparliament to maintain their economic privileges. Landowners, as Brown trenchantlyargues, were the dominant force in the Scottish parliament over its entire history.Whether lairds count as part of the nobility has created a minor disturbance in Scottishhistorical circles; Brown’s case for viewing them as ‘lesser nobility’ who shared the sameinterests as the titled ‘greater nobility’ is broadly convincing. However, like Brown’sassertion that landowners experienced only cosmetic changes to their power and influ-ence over five centuries, there is a sense that potentially-interesting ambiguities havebeen glossed over. By suggesting that ‘the gentrie’ and ‘the noble men’ were sometimesperceived as having distinctive parliamentary interests, I am not ‘following the English

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model’ (p. 68), but quoting from James VI’s experienced officer of state, ThomasHamilton, earl of Melrose. His ruminations on this point hint at complexities that all theessays, by the very nature of broad surveys, can struggle to reflect.

For many readers, the chapters by Alastair Mann, on procedure, and A. Mark Godfrey,on the law, may prove to be the most informative and stimulating. Mann’s work digsdeeper into largely unbroken ground by setting out how parliament went about itsbusiness, what sort of ceremonial surrounded its activities, and what happened oncemembers were inside the chamber. Undeniably a leading expert on Scottish parliamen-tary procedure, Mann was a more curious choice to write a second contribution onmarriage, family, poverty, and other things that seem to have been lumped together as‘social’ legislation. The chapter did not ask necessary questions about effectiveness andimplementation. A. Mark Godfrey helpfully reminds us that parliament was originally alaw court as well as a legislator. There is a nuanced account of how the receding of itsjudicial role overlapped with the gradual shifts ‘in practice and perception’ that led to theassociation of parliament with supreme legislative authority (p. 176). Godfrey’s emphasison the ambiguities in contemporary understandings of the role of parliament differs fromthe more schematic interpretation offered by Julian Goodare. A ‘medieval, parliamentarymonarchy’ gave way in the 16th century to a ‘newly integrated state’, headed by ‘asovereign body’ that we know as ‘the crown in parliament’ (pp. 246–7). Parliamentfulfilled various roles at different times: there were five processes for establishing newregimes in which parliament had a part (p. 253), two possible relationships with executivegovernment (p. 257), and four ‘characteristic types of political behaviour’ encouraged byits existence (p. 261). Meanwhile, most of the people who sat in, or wrote about,Scotland’s parliaments seem to have been ignorant of, confused about, or simply unin-terested in, this sort of tidy categorisation.

This book did not seek to be comprehensive. Authors justifiably object to being toldby someone else what they should have written about but, in this instance, what got leftout is instructive about the scope of this final volume. According to the editors, it can,in part, be regarded as a set of ‘progress reports on what we have learned’ (p. xiii). I hadhoped to open this book and also find a bold agenda for future research. A four-pagepreface informs us that certain topics, notably taxation, the language of parliament, andforeign policy, were not covered. Why not? ‘Crowds and popular petitions’ were almostliterally given a mention (p. 273). The parliamentary record itself, our knowledge ofwhich ought to have been transformed by the industrious efforts of the project’s leadingresearchers, is not explicitly discussed. There was no sustained analysis of (and, indeed,some confusion over) the seemingly peculiar development of two procedurally-differenttypes of assembly, called parliaments and conventions.There is much to welcome and topraise in this scholarly work, not least the almost uniformly clear and accessible writing.But the statement that the Scottish parliament (and its British successor) was ‘theplayground of the great landlords’ is revealing about where the boundaries of this studylie (p. 94). So it was, but the follow-up question is whether the Scottish parliament wasconsidered relevant and authoritative by anyone other than a few hundred privilegedmen. Did it need to be anything more? In this volume, it would seem not.

LAURA A.M. STEWARTBirkbeck College, University of London

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The Elizabethan World. Edited by Susan Doran and Norman Jones. London:Routledge. 2010. xvii, 714 pp. £150.00. ISBN 9780415409599.

These days, companion volumes seem to have taken on the attributes of coat hangers –one day you have a shortage and the next time you turn around they’ve multiplied andthe house is full of them.And after all, how many of these books covering, by and large,the same elements of history and literature does one really need? The Elizabethan World,though, may well be the one to turn to again and again – the doyen of the genre.Thisrecommendation, however, comes with a major caveat – but more on that later.

After a brief introduction by Doran and Jones that tackles both the historiography ofElizabethan England and provides a succinct overview of Elizabeth’s reign, the volumeopens with a section on ‘Governance and Politics’. By and large this section coversfamiliar territory – for example, David Dean reprises his work on parliament; SusanDoran’s essay examines the beliefs and image of Elizabeth; and Anne McLaren uses thesuccession crisis to examine the articulation of political ideas of female sovereignty andthe debate on the limits of monarchial power. Other very welcome contributions in thissection are Natalie Mears’s essay on the understudied privy council and William Tighe’selucidation of the workings of the privy court.Away from the focus on Westminster andWhitehall, J.P.D. Cooper assesses the degree to which historical studies of the localitieshave come to the forefront since G.R. Elton’s Tudor Constitution (Cambridge, 1960)famously admitted that attempts to understand local administration ‘meet unsolvedproblems at every turn’ (p. 130) and H.R. French looks at parish government.The finaltwo pieces in the section are Cyndia Clegg’s discussion of Elizabethan censorship andpropaganda and David Edwards’s essay on Ireland.

Four essays on religion comprise Part 2 of the volume. Brett Usher examines thedoctrine and structure of the Elizabethan church,William Sheils reflects on the catholiccommunity, while parish religion is the subject of John Craig’s essay and godly protes-tantism that of Peter Kaufman’s contribution. Overall, this section, although short,provides a succinct introduction to the major religious issues of the reign. But it is in Part3, ‘Society’, where the volume starts to come alive and differentiate itself from similarcollections.This is particularly apparent in Paul Griffith’s excellent piece on the problemsof youth in Elizabethan England (both male and female), Tim Stretton’s overview ofwomen, Alexandra Shepherd’s discussion of family and household, and Steve Hindle’sexamination of poverty and the poor laws. Social classes are covered through SusanAmussen’s fine essay on social hierarchies and Janet Dickinson’s analysis of the nobilityand gentry, while Krista Kesselring ranges through the field of rebellion, disorder andcrime. The inclusion of these subjects provides a refreshing change of pace from theconcentration on high politics that demarcates most offerings in this field.

The strength of the volume continues through the next two sections, Part 4 on theeconomy and Part 5 on culture. David Harris Sacks charts the discourse aroundeconomic thought, Ian Archer neatly encapsulates commerce and consumption, bothinside and outside of London and further essays touch upon rural economies (R.W.Hoyle) and the urban economic landscape (Joseph Ward and Muriel McClendon). Allthis provides a stimulating and surprisingly in-depth look at the Elizabethan economicworld-view.The cultural section is more of a mixed bag as it ranges from architecture to

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witchcraft. Perhaps simply because culture is such a diverse and contested category, theselection of subjects here seems more arbitrary. For instance, Freya Jensen’s piece onintellectual developments has the unenviable task of fitting education, science, Latinatecircles and antiquarianism into a few thousand words – that she succeeds is admirable.Further pieces include the theatre (Lawrence Manley), poetry (Stephen May), news (JoanRaymond) and the visual arts (Richard Williams).

The final part of the volume deals with foreign climes through essays on England’srelationship with Europe (David Potter), military intervention (Paul Hammer), explora-tion, trade and empire (Ken MacMillan) and Elizabethan thinking about the outsideworld (Matthew Dimmock). The essays are all of a uniformly high quality but onecannot help feeling that old patterns and chronologies are repeated. In a similar fashionto what was done with the diversity of the section on society, new ground could havebeen broken in this type of volume with essays on, for example, England and Scotland,ambassadors (both English ambassadors abroad and foreign representatives to England),and the impact of aliens and denizens within England. Even adding a couple of newapproaches here would have given this section a fresh feel to it and also helped todifferentiate this volume from the competition.

These impressive 38 contributions reinvigorating Elizabethan England come at no smallcost. Here’s the caveat – who exactly is this book aimed at? At 714 pages it is immense andso is the price, £150 or $250. For the academic specialist the book is an extremely usefulsynopsis of the Elizabeth period, but given that personal libraries will hold monographs onthese subjects, many, I am sure, will be reluctant to open their wallets. For undergraduatesand those with a general interest in the later half of the 16th century the price is out ofreach and in the current economic climate it must be considered more of a luxury than anecessity for many libraries as well.The price no doubt skyrocketed with the inclusion ofnumerous illustrations, but despite the publisher’s (arguable) claim that it is ‘beautifullyillustrated’, many seem unnecessary and unevenly distributed. For example, Dean’s essayon parliament benefits immensely from the inclusion of three depictions of WestminsterPalace but why is Manley’s article on the theatre bereft of images? A minor quibbleperhaps, but when the volume reaches this sort of price, a little more consistency wouldhave been welcome.This aside, the editors have done a superb job of assembling a stellarcast who have produced a broad diversity of excellent articles. One hopes that thepublisher will publish a paperback edition of the volume soon – that way someone canafford to buy it and The ElizabethanWorld will get the audience it so richly deserves.

CHRIS R. KYLESyracuse University

The English Revolution, c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities. Edited byNicholas Tyacke. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2007.x, 212 pp. £55.00. ISBN 9780719077074.

The question of periodisation is a vital one in framing the questions historians ask of atopic and in helping condition the answers they produce. Nicholas Tyacke favours the

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long view. He has previously edited a volume of contributions to the Neale Colloquiumas England’s Long Reformation, 1500–1800 (1997) and here has overseen the publicationof another set to the same forum which is concerned with placing the upheavals of the1640s and 1650s ‘in the context of a long seventeenth century’. Although the Englishrevolution (emphatically not the civil wars or ‘rebellion’) is ostensibly the focus of thiswork, the emphasis on the longue durée means that the revolution becomes the fulcrumaround which longer-term developments pivot rather than the subject of close analysisitself. As a result, the 1640s and 1650s can be elusive in parts of the text, and thecoherence of the volume can suffer as a result.

Tyacke has sometimes been corralled with revisionist historians of the 17th century,largely because his influential thesis regarding the disruptive rise of anti-Calvinists underJames I and Charles I became a cornerstone of the intellectual project of the lateProfessor Conrad Russell. Here Tyacke decisively rejects such historiographical associa-tions by emphasising the long-term nature of the civil wars, their revolutionary char-acter and the profundity of their consequences for government and society. This, then,is framed as a post-revisionist undertaking, and some of the most prominent builders ofthe current anti-Russellian orthodoxy, most notably Ann Hughes and Richard Cust,contribute essays. Tyacke’s introduction is a hybrid attack on revisionist reductivismand short-sightedness, which mixes an intriguing review of ‘revolutionary’ terminologydescribing the 1640s and 1650s in pre-Gardinerian historiography, with a case forplacing the revolution within a broader narrative that reaches back to the 1590s andforward to the early 18th century. Here we find reanimated the usual suspects of thepre-revisionist landscape: the apology of 1604, Peter Wentworth, monopolies, puritan-ism, but whereas the Notesteinian narrative made explicit the connections between theapology and the civil wars, here the connecting links in the chain are much less-clearlyassembled.This is a muddier high road to civil war which deals more in the contextualthan the explicitly causal.

The essays which comprise the volume follow this broad agenda of providing contextsfor understanding and interpreting the place of the mid-century crisis within broadertrends and developments. However, the historiographical issues raised in Tyacke’s intro-duction, indeed the whole subject of the civil wars, can fall from view as we pursue arather atomised set of topics. It perhaps tells us something about the discursive andpost-structuralist underpinnings of recent interpretations that it is the reader who has todo most of the work in finding the meanings and connections between these pieces.Theunifying themes here are those which have formed the conceptual and methodologicalglue holding together the post-revisionist approach: the force and persistence of ideo-logical conflict, the potency of public politics and the rise of the public sphere, thesignificance of print in informing and influencing opinion within this discursive space,and the importance of the religious politics which accompanied the fracturing ofprotestant unity in the 17th century.

All the essays are stimulating and thought-provoking pieces, but they often crystalliseand summarize work found elsewhere rather than offer novel interpretations or evi-dence. John Walter’s essay, for example, effectively distils his recent work on popularpolitics and the crowd; one-third of the footnotes are to his own published work. SeanKelsey’s contribution on the micro-politics of Eikon Basilike is of a piece with his otherarticles interpreting the trial of Charles I as an exercise in protracted factional negotia-

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tion, a position which looks less assured after recent interventions in this debate by CliveHolmes and Mark Kishlansky. Mark Knights’s piece is a summary of themes found in hisRepresentation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain (Oxford, 2005) while MikeBraddick’s stimulating essay (taken from his keynote Neale Lecture) on the long-termimplications of the revolution for English political culture and the languages of politics,has largely been superseded by his elaboration of these themes in his splendid God’s Fury,England’s Fire (2008).

Also building upon earlier work, Richard Cust’s essay offers a thoughtful andnuanced discussion of the ways in which contemporaries conceptualised early Stuartpolitics along the lines of exclusivist conspiracy theories – of the ‘patriots’ whofavoured open politics to combat the creeping threat of popery, and those whoopposed ‘popular spirits’, seeing anarchy and dissolution in any popular or puritancritique of government. Recent work by Ethan Shagan on moderation has problema-tised the supposed ubiquity of such binary conceptualisations in early modern culture,however, and may serve to nuance some of Cust’s claims. Ann Hughes offers a reveal-ing view of the religious diversity on offer in revolutionary London, drawing on herdeep knowledge of the milieu of Thomas Edwards, while Andy Wood also presents asubject familiar from other work – plebeian speech – and suggests how a genderanalysis of seditious words is revealing of the ways in which individuals in the 1550sand 1680s criticized female rule. Although the essay is stimulating in itself, its claimsof relevance for studying the civil wars seem strained. Anthony Milton offers anexcellent discussion that questions our assumptions (derived partly from Hookerianrhetoric) about the unity and inclusiveness of the early modern parish. Enumeratingall those who were not in church on a Sunday and who challenged traditional con-ceptualisations of local religious community provides some important precursors forthe challenges to parochial government and identity in the 1640s and 1650s. Thebreakdown of the parish in the 1640s and its travails in the Restoration is the subjectof Dan Beaver’s essay, which argues that the civil war destroyed many of the symbolsand processes that comprised traditional parish communities, while the Restorationregimes targeted, particularly, those who most visibly transgressed the bounds of theparish, such as the quakers.

Although somewhat uneven in its coverage, tone and focus, and with some of itsmaterial familiar from other sources, this is, nevertheless, a useful volume with manyinsights and much intelligent discussion. It provides a good snapshot of the disparatenarratives which have replaced the whig, Marxist and revisionist views of the field.Thesehave a thematic convergence in their emphases on the public sphere, print and religiouspolitics, but this also means that they have significant blind spots.The only royalists hereare those courtiers intriguing behind the Eikon, and the emergence of any kind ofpopular royalism is hard to understand from this material. These essays have alsoabandoned any British perspective – perhaps too tainted by functionalist Russellianexogenesis – and this has reverted to an English story, which means that in pursuing themicro-contexts for the social depth of politics in this period, some of the larger structuralcontexts have, unfortunately, been left behind.

LLOYD BOWENCardiff University

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Vaincre Louis XIV: Angleterre-Hollande-France – Histoire d’une Relation Triangulaire1665–1688. By Charles-Edouard Levillain. Seyssel: Editions ChampVallon. 2010.456 pp. €28.00. ISBN 9782876735279.

At a time when historians of England are occasionally being told that they should puttheir work in a European context (often by colleagues using mainly works in English)it is refreshing to read a work by a young French historian that is genuinely multinationaland multilingual. Its main focus is the failure of the two major protestant powers ofnorth-west Europe to join forces against Louis XIV, widely seen in both England andHolland as the major threat to protestantism, liberty and prosperity. Despite the dates inthe title, most of the book covers the period 1665–84 – the second and third Anglo-Dutch wars (1665–7 and 1672–4), the later stages of the war that ended with the peaceof Nijmegen and, finally, the years in which Louis managed to extend his territories stillfurther, until they were secured by the truce of Ratisbon in 1684. During this finalperiod, both England and Holland were hamstrung by internal divisions: Charles II hadto contend with the Exclusion Crisis and then rebuild his power, while William III waslocked in a bitter struggle with the city of Amsterdam.The final phase – culminating inthe ‘Anglo-Dutch moment’ of 1688 – is dealt with in a brief conclusion.This outline isfamiliar enough. What is new about this book is the study of each of the threeprotagonists in turn and their complex interrelationship.This is done using an enormousrange of sources – not just diplomatic and administrative, but also town records (espe-cially in Holland), private papers and a wide range of printed and manuscript news andpropaganda. Levillain is very aware of the importance of public opinion in both Hollandand England. Although Charles II was a crowned king and William was not, bothwielded considerable power (including the power to harm and even eliminate theirenemies) but both had to contend with a volatile, and sometimes violent, populace.Moreover, the battle for hearts and minds extended beyond the three main protagonists.William operated within painfully assembled, and often unwieldy, coalitions and hispublic statements about James II had to be tailored so as not to offend his catholic allies,the emperor and the king of Spain.

This is ‘big-picture’ history, which captures the multiplicity of pressures and consid-erations with which princes had to contend. Levillain avoids the temptation to giveprivilege to one issue or one explanation over others: different considerations playedtheir part among some people at some time, and people did not always behave in waysthat we might regard as consistent. He has no time for the traditional view thatinternational relations ceased to be dominated by religion after the peace of Westphalia.For William, Louis XIV posed a threat to protestantism as well as to the autonomy of hisneighbours. Bishop Burnet wrote that the French attack on Holland in 1672 marked thefifth, and greatest, crisis of the protestant religion. But Levillain reminds us that thenature of ‘protestantism’ was contested in England and Holland, and, of course, the verysurvival of French protestantism was in jeopardy in the 1680s. Equally, he gives dueweight to economics and geopolitics: trade and the sovereignty of the sea are both seenas important factors in the war of 1665–7. He distinguishes between dislike of Louis XIVand his perceived territorial ambitions, and a widespread admiration for French culture,architecture, wine and food; this was shared by William III, whose palace at Het Loo was

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built in the French style – with French gardens.The wide scope of this study, the largerange of sources and this willingness to consider a variety of explanations, togetherensure that there is no easily-identifiable ‘theme’ or conclusion. He analyses differentsystems of administration, political institutions and political cultures in the three coun-tries. He considers the components of power: money, men and ships and the organisationneeded to make the best use of them. For this reader the material on England is(predictably) the most familiar, but even here there are some surprises. The Dutchmaterial, and especially the conduct of Gaspar Fagel, is the most unfamiliar: Levillainmanages to explain how the Dutch political system, on the face of it a recipe for endlessprocrastination and confusion, could be made to work. The book is aimed (naturally)primarily at French readers, to whom more needs to be explained about England andHolland than about France; but English readers have much to learn from it too. It is anambitious and demanding book, but one which is very rewarding: a work of interna-tional history which remembers that internal factors can play a vital part in foreignrelations.

JOHN MILLERQueen Mary University of London

After Number 10: Former Prime Ministers in British Politics. By Kevin Theakston.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2010. viii, 269 pp. £57.50. ISBN9780230202184.

Stanley Baldwin, Harold Wilson and Lyndon Johnson are rare among political leaders injumping before they were pushed.The lure of office and the fascination with power andstatus far more often keeps men and women in post after, and sometimes long after,either their own capacities or their colleagues’ estimations adequately sustain them intheir task. A belief in one’s own indispensability seems almost a qualification for highoffice. But go in the end they all do, pushed either by the electorate or by their enemiesand friends.What they do after power, however, varies hugely. Some devote tireless andfruitless energy trying to get back; others happily continue to cruise in politics; somecreate a different public career as elder statesmen; others content themselves withfarming or sailing or writing. Some mix them, like Edward Heath, some nibble half-heartedly like Harold Wilson, and find the experience unsatisfying. There are differentways of trying to get back, too. If, like Lloyd George, the departure is from both thepremiership and effective party leadership, the tendency may be to Gaullism; if it is onlythe first, then like Asquith the departed premier hangs on too long as a party leader butoutside government.

Similarities there certainly are. There is a recurring reluctance to accept that one isdispensable. But even that thread of continuity is more marked the further politicsadvances into the age of mass parties and a mass electorate, while the differences betweenone ex-premier and another can be as great as the similarities, whatever the epoch.Attleeannounced that on leaving active politics, he had ‘arrived at the age of irresponsibility’and could say whatever he liked. Later members of Theakston’s gallery arrived rather at

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the age of portentousness. Churchill’s years after office were far more public than wereAttlee’s, and he found the transition difficult in a way that seems not to have touchedhis Labour colleague.When a message was once sent to him from the cabinet office bydispatch rider, it was not the message, but the manner of its delivery, which mattered to,and gratified, him. But both men found it difficult to believe that they did not continueto contribute something to government and to their parties that no one else could.

Eighteenth- and early-19th-century statesmen had fewer such grand illusions. Theywere, after all, rather closer to the effective electorate than were their successors. Ina democracy there is the tension between appearing representative and appearingexceptional.The longer men and women stay in office, the longer the latter is likely topredominate. If it does not, as it seems not to have done with Attlee once he had given upthe party leadership, the subsequent years are likely to be much less fraught.With EdwardHeath, on the other hand, the belief that on the one hand he had been stabbed in the back,and on the other he might regain high office, led to growing bitterness and unhappiness.

Without the same rigidities of party or the national decisiveness of elections, 18th- andearly-19th-century statesmen moved into, out of, and around, government with a fluiditywhich was lost with the slow growth of a popular franchise and which was part of a publicand elite world very different from that occupied by 20th- and 21st-century politicians, forwhom entering government could be a triumphal moment, and leaving it a traumatic one.When the world of politics and government is restricted to those in a small section of thepopulation who are distinguished also by their wealth and social status, politics may be nomore than part of life, and playing a part in it or not playing a part may be no more thanhunting or planning one’s woods and avenues, activities which may be pursued one dayand not another, but where not doing them does not mean leaving one world and enteringanother. With the growth of a more democratic society, roles become fragmented andspecialised, and an either/or dimension of politics emerges which had not existed in asmaller and more comprehensive society. The social transformation is paralleled by apolitical one, so that ‘party’ signifies something very different in 1800 from what it wouldsignify by 1900, polities divided by a common language.

Thatcher and Blair, the last two premiers discussed by Theakston, lived after office in aworld very different from that occupied by Baldwin, MacDonald, or Chamberlain, andeven distinct from that occupied by Churchill and Attlee. Churchill filled his retirementfrom government with publishing enterprises to fuel his income in a way which might nothave been available to his predecessors, even such a prolific and successful writer asDisraeli, but was, unlike the activities of Thatcher and Blair, limited to the establishedmedia of books and films.Attlee by contrast, once recycled to the house of lords, travelledthere by third-class rail and tube. It’s difficult to imagine either Thatcher or Blair on thetop of a London bus. This is, in part, a difference in individual character, but also ofchanging political culture.Theakston’s earliest examples would never have travelled in away which made them indistinguishable from the rest of the population, because they hadalways been highly distinguishable. But as statesman in a pre-democratic society, it wouldhave made no sense to appear ordinary, let alone to be ordinary.

Theakston has provided succinct and efficient summaries of the currently-availableinformation about each prime-ministerial life from Walpole to Blair. His dependence onexisting work has meant that the text is shaped by the available published evidence asmuch as by the overall theme of life after the premiership. Politicians about whose time

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after high office little is known or published get more attention devoted to theirpremiership; those about whom there is fuller biographical information have theprincipal emphasis on their time after the top of the ladder.

Because ceasing to be prime minister does not have one single significance for all theformer premiers discussed, but can be one of a wide range of events, the pattern of thebook provides a string on which to thread many different stories, rather than a set ofcomparable instances. There are many interesting questions, which Theakston leavesunanswered.What does the record which he presents tell us about the changing natureof public life? Is politics at one time simply a normal part of the life of a wealthy andwell-placed male, and, if so, does this differ from politics as a career? Does the modernworld offer opportunities for remaining in public life without engaging in direct politicsor government, which were not available to earlier men and women? How unusual is avoluntary departure such as Wilson’s and what does that tell us about the job? But whilstTheakston could have been more curious and speculative about the rich topic he haspresented, the book cannot fail to set readers thinking along tracks that might nototherwise have occurred to them.

RODNEY BARKERLondon School of Economics

Aspects of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and SwedishParliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800. By Pasi Ihalainen. (Studies in theHistory of Political Thought, 4.) Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. 2010. xv, 530 pp.€129.50. ISBN 9789004183360.

Comparative history offers much but is not without its problems. Pasi Ihalainen, a Finnishscholar of note, has already written extensively on 18th-century Britain and Sweden; hisworks include The Discourse on Political Pluralism in Early Eighteenth-Century England (1999)and Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric ofEnglish, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (2005). In his new book, he focusesanew on the people as a key theme in political culture. The prime objective of histhoughtful study is that of estimating how, and to what extent, the ‘parliamentary establish-ments’ in Britain and Sweden became advocates of more modern notions of democracyand the sovereignty of the people by giving them a clearer linguistic expression, recogni-tion and acceptance in parliamentary and associated public debates. Ihalainen presentsWalpole as advancing a critique of democracy when, in 1734, he opposed the shorteningof parliamentary terms.Walpole’s argument was not new, and discussion of the appropriatenature and representation of popular views had played a major role in political argumentfor at least a century.Although Ihalainen’s starting point can be debated, he then carries hisargument forward, offering another perspective on familiar episodes and issues. However,this perspective can lead to an exaggeration of the issue of popular power.

Sweden is presented as providing a significant case in the development of the notionsof popular government. By the end of the 1760s, the concepts of the people and thenation were clearly being increasingly used at the Swedish diet in political contexts, and

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sometimes in quite radical senses. References at the diet to the political power of thepeople, however, revealed that the debaters had no exact concept of popular sovereigntyon which to build their arguments.

In British parliamentary debates in the mid 1780s, an increasingly positive, moreoptimistic and future-oriented concept of democracy is presented as emerging byIhalainen, although, as he notes, it remained linked to the traditional notion of amixed constitution in its British form. He argues that these debates constituted aforum for conceptual revisions that would lead, later, towards more modern notions ofpopular sovereignty and representative democracy. An interesting book, albeit some-what teleological.

JEREMY BLACKUniversity of Exeter

Ecclesiastical Patronage in England, 1770–1801. By Reider Payne. Lewiston, NY:Edwin Mellen Press. 2010. vi, 358 pp. £74.95. ISBN 9780773437890.

Based on a study of four late-18th-century patronage networks, those of the earls ofHardwicke and Malmesbury, of Charles Jenkinson and of George Pretyman, bishop ofLincoln, this study draws on a wide range of archival material in order to highlight theconcerns of patrons and clients involved in the distribution of places within the Churchof England.The reciprocity of patron-client relations emerges clearly, and could involvepolitical support, as in the case of Robert Plumptre and the 2nd earl of Hardwicke,especially in the 1780 general election.The 3rd earl also had a number of clerical clientswho were politically useful in Cambridgeshire, and Payne argues that patronage forclerical clients from gentry families proved a way to cement Yorke hegemony over thesefamilies. As far as the Harris family, later earls of Malmesbury, is concerned, therelationship focused on the corporation of Christchurch. James Harris’s Book ofRequests demonstrated his organised approach to requesting ecclesiastical and secularpatronage for his electors, and Church and state preferments were treated as one.Pretyman, as the government’s appointments’ adviser, was keenly aware of the linkbetween services rendered for his patron’s administration and clerical rewards. Politicalinterests came before theological politics, as when Peter Peckard was given the deaneryof Peterborough in 1792. Networks also relied on successful patron-to-patron connec-tions. For example, the bishopric of Ely’s patronage was indispensable to Yorke interests,especially to livings in Cambridgeshire, and these bolstered Yorke personal patronage intheir county. Conversely, James Harris sr’s failure as a patron to secure patronage fromLord North resulted in the breakdown of his relationship with his most important client.Crown patronage was highly significant. Payne also looks at Cambridge and Oxfordlinkages, at the inheritance of clients and contacts within the family, and at the role oftheological orthodoxy and political loyalty. A most useful work.

JEREMY BLACKUniversity of Exeter

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Borderline Citizens:Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–1867. ByKathryn Gleadle. (A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship Monograph.)Oxford: Oxford University Press for The British Academy. 2009. x, 321 pp.£55.00. ISBN 9780197264492.

If Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s study of domestic ideology, Family Fortunesremains – in Kathryn Gleadle’s words – ‘the most influential work in British genderhistory’,1 this is partly because the controversies it provoked are still unresolved. Didthe prescriptive literature of the early 19th century reflect change or continuity inthinking about the proper roles of the sexes? How did the ideology of ‘separatespheres’ relate to the way men and women actually behaved? With these questions inmind, Borderline Citizens looks at the place of middle-class and gentry women inBritish politics in the decades before the campaign for women’s suffrage got going.Gleadle presents a richly-documented account of the ‘landscape of politics’ between1815 and 1867, complemented by three case studies – on the 1832 Reform Act, theEastbourne landowner and poor law reformer, Mary Ann Gilbert, and the familynetwork of the anti-slavery campaigner and MP, Thomas Fowell Buxton. This is asurvey of panoramic scope, dealing with the gender politics of conservative ultra-protestantism as well as with movements associated with liberal nonconformity andwith the countryside as well as with the towns. A concern to understand the sub-jective experience of women who engaged with politics gives the book a unifyingtheme and opens up interesting new perspectives on the ways in which gender canoperate in public life.

Contemporary sources – archival, printed and visual – show that women weremuch more politically aware, involved in the political process and likely to be presenton public occasions than the secondary literature leads one to expect. Yet it was apolitical culture full of inconsistencies and contradictions. Women themselves in thesegenerations colluded in the convention that politics was a male domain. Just as femalescholars of the period would often protest their ‘amateur’ status, so politically-activewomen would modestly disclaim pretensions to political insight, or fitness for publicresponsibilities. A woman might adopt a defensive pose – ‘I will not attempt to arguemy point; you will perhaps only smile at the attempt’ (p. 1), or ‘You know I am nopolitician’ (p. 184) – in exchanges with a male correspondent or a dominant familymember. But the insecurity of women’s standing in the public sphere was also amatter of common experience. Women’s signatures on petitions, or presence in forceat public meetings, could attract ridicule and be used to undermine the cause theysupported. They were frequently excluded from political platforms and public debates.Even ostensibly feminine pursuits, such as parish visiting and charity bazaars provokedcriticism from those who saw woman’s sphere as restricted to home and family. Onthe other hand, there was an array of forces, some traditional, some new, that broughtthem into the political arena. In some contexts, especially at the parish level, womenmight be qualified to vote and hold office. A political system in which the vote wasregarded as ‘a piece of family property’, and the ‘influence’ of non-electors in parlia-mentary elections was, in any case, regarded as legitimate, left many openings forfemale participation. This was, of course, encouraged opportunistically by parties that

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stood to benefit. Women were also, as in the past, drawn into politics by their religiousaffiliations. The accession of Queen Victoria seems to have encouraged more of themto sign petitions. The early years of her reign saw encroachment by the state on parishconcerns (such as the poor law and schooling) in which women had long been activeand acquired some expertise. The female ‘expert’ – a Harriet Martineau or FlorenceNightingale – could gain recognition and a hearing from male politicians, and in themiddle decades of the century through the Social Science Association. Within politicalfamilies, even where a hierarchy of gender roles was broadly maintained, daughters,sisters and wives were recruited as secretaries or speech-writers, and in public meetingsthey occupied a privileged place on platforms. Above all, Gleadle argues, the continu-ing influence of women of gentry and substantial business families in rural commu-nities and small towns has been underestimated. Such women might play little part inparliamentary party politics but their authority at the local level was as strong as ever.The public work of Mary Ann Gilbert, for example, drew on family traditions ofpaternalism and needed no new-fangled notions of social maternalism or ‘woman’smission’ to legitimate it. For propertied women, just as for women of the workingclasses, community politics could be empowering.

The phrase ‘borderline citizens’ is used by Gleadle to describe the standing ofmiddle-class and gentry women in this era – not excluded from public life, but on themargins, precariously present, the terms on which they participated depending oncircumstance and always subject to renegotiation. It is a way of conceptualisingwomen’s place in a predominantly male political world that could be equally useful tohistorians of later periods. For the decades covered by this study, the message is thatthere were no sharp discontinuities in definition of the ‘woman’s sphere’. There is aconvincingly revisionist interpretation here of the gender politics of the 1830s. Leg-islation that has been seen by some historians as showing a new determination toexclude women from citizenship – the Great Reform Act, the Municipal Corpora-tions Act – was actually accompanied by a growing tendency for MPs to recognizeand court women constituents in their speeches. Female voting in parish vestries wentunchallenged and there was much cross-party sympathy in parliament for the free-men’s daughters who in 1832 lost their customary right to confer a vote on theirhusbands on marriage. Women participated on both sides in the reform agitation ofthe early 1830s and seem to have been politicised by the experience. For all theheightened sensibility on gendered proprieties that marked this period, politicalboundaries were not more clearly defined than they were in the past; nor was thestatus of women as ‘political subjects’, or their subjective experience of the politicalprocess, less complex in the 1860s than it was in 1815.

JANET HOWARTHSt Hilda’s College Oxford

1 K. Gleadle, ‘Revisiting Family Fortunes: Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Publication of L.Davidoff and C. Hall (1987), Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London:Hutchinson)’, Women’s History Review, xvi (2007), 774.

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The Parliamentary Career of Charles De Laet Waldo Sibthorp, 1826–1855: Ultra-ToryOpposition to Reform in Nineteenth Century Britain. Edited by Stephen Roberts andMark Acton. Lewiston, NY and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. 2010. 156 pp.£64.95. ISBN 9780773413597.

Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp (1783–1855) was habitually referred to in Punch andParliamentary Debates alike as ‘the Gallant Colonel’. The compliment was clearly back-handed. Sibthorp’s colonelcy was no higher than a rank in the South Lincoln militia whilsthis much-invoked gallantry did not prevent him living openly with a mistress in DorsetStreet; an act which finally led to his wife’s suit for a separation in December 1828.Sibthorp’s claims to distinction, such as they are, are to be found in the pertinacity andconsistency of his opposition to all forms of social and political change – an attitude ofmind (as much as politics) which has come to delineate him, in most accounts of theperiod, as an ultra-tory. Stephen Roberts and Mark Acton have sought a dignifiedrestoration of Sibthorp’s place in the parliamentary history of his age from the vantagepoint provided by his imprint in the public record – his speeches, election addresses andrepresentations in Punch – a line of investigation influenced by the paucity of documenta-tion relating to him in the extant family papers. Rather, they have consulted the teemingfiles of local newspapers and the massed volumes of Hansard to draw out a picture of anirascible but unmovable presence in the house of commons in the age of reform.The resultis a slim but interesting volume comprising two biographical-political essays (whichconstitute the best part of the book), followed by a series of themed chapters delineatingSibthorp’s experiences at election time and gathering together some of the more notableof his utterances regarding protestantism, electoral reform, the corn laws and publicfinances, railways, the Great Exhibition of 1851 and what is described as a ‘SibthorpMiscellany’.The volume loses some of its coherence as we reach this stage of proceedingswith a series of appendices covering such related, but nevertheless diverse, subjects as theparliamentary career of his son,Gervaise (the conclusion being that he had no such career),a list (amounting to little more than briefly-drawn pencil sketches) of ‘Six SignificantUltra-Tories’ and a breathless run through the early issues of John Bull (an ‘ultra’ periodicalwhich has already received better attention in Bill Newton-Dunn’s biography of its editor,Theodore Hook).The result of all this effort is an interesting and, in its own way, invaluablecontribution to understanding the world-view of a particularly energetic (not to sayeccentric) ultra-tory. However, it can hardly be said to justify the handsome cover pricecharged by its publishers.This is the sort of volume which would have found a healthiermarket and a wider take-up with a local history record series or in an attractive paperbackimprint – at a little over 125 pages, few other than specialists and university libraries (ifeven those) will be willing to commit to the expense. Nor have the publishers done theirauthors a service with their production values – an uninteresting cover image, poor qualitycolour binding and pot luck as to whether or not your copy comes with a full colourimage of Canwick Hall (Sibthorp’s family seat); the copy in my university library did, myreview copy did not. Reading many of Sibthorp’s interventions in debate, one is struck bythe almost total lack of context required in reading them. One can construct a continuousnarrative of the outpourings of Colonel Sibthorp over some three decades in parliamentwith scarcely a glance at the date, so repetitive and undeveloped do his attitudes, as revealed

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through his public utterances, seem to be.This is why, amongst ultra-tories as a whole, he isa far less interesting case study than some of his compeers – Vyvyan, Knatchbull, Inglis,Chandos, or Matthias Attwood – in explaining the opposition raised by the onward marchof reform.As such, whilst this is a book which contains much of real and genuine value ona neglected subject, one must regret that the authors did not choose for their case study amore interesting, complex, two-dimensional character and a publisher who could haveproduced a volume which was likely to be more widely read.

RICHARD A. GAUNTUniversity of Nottingham

Parties and People: England 1914–1951. By Ross McKibbin. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. 2010. ix, 224 pp. Hardback £21.00; paperback £14.99. ISBN9780199584697; 9780199605170.

I was not looking forward to this. I thought Ross McKibbin’s Parties and People would bejust another potboiler; either a dreary rehash of stuff already written, or a portmanteau formaterial that had accumulated over the author’s long career, yet which, for one reason oranother, had so far not seen the light of published day.The Ford Lecture series on whichthe book is substantially based, I had in mind as a sort of dignified valedictory ‘gong’, a sortof Oxford lifetime achievement award, and told myself that what would be well-receivedin audience-forgiving lecture mode would constitute an awkwardly spatchcocked assem-blage when translated into print.Thus it was that I began reading Parties and People withlow expectations, muttering darkly that the book was a very slim volume.

Well, fat Parties and People may not be, but I was wrong on every other count. It is abook high on quality. Ross McKibbin writes with verve and style. He has produced awork that is both interesting and original – not in the sense of introducing new materialor an untried form of analysis, but in the sense of composing an unusual, if characteristic,synthesis.There is an impressive confidence and an authority about the way the authorwrites. Indeed, he has more in common with A.J.P. Taylor than preference for mereEnglish for British in his choice of title. Plenty might quibble at his claim that in the37-year span of the period he has chosen (1914–51), English politics were ‘to a quiteunusual extent’ in step with the politics of Wales and Scotland, but there is a charm tohis tongue-in-cheek magisterialism.

NICK SMARTUniversity of Plymouth

The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron. By Tim Bale. Cambridge: PolityPress. 2010. x, 446 pp. £25.00. ISBN 9780745648576.

Tim Bale begins his study of the long march of the Conservative Party after the 1990deposing of Margaret Thatcher by rejecting monochrome accounts of politics.Whilst he

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draws on a wide range of secondary material, Bale is firmly eclectic in his use of it,rejecting the sometimes one-dimensional explanations which can be found in politicalscience, in favour of attention to what he describes as the interrelationships of causes. Heargues that since ‘party politics, indeed all politics, is essentially the interaction of ideas,interests, institutions, and, of course, individuals’. Yet whilst Bale denies primacy to anysingle factor, his account insists on the continuing importance of ideology. It is partlybecause of this importance that parties again and again fail to act as rational calculators ofelectoral advantage. If they were simply machines for winning elections, they would followStuart Ball’s golden rule of office-seeking after defeat: new faces, party unity, a distinctive,new, and well-publicised agenda, an efficient organisation and, perhaps most important ofall, a readiness to change in response to old failures, new possibilities, and the priorities ofthe electorate even if, or especially if, this does not match the ideology of the party.

The major part of the book is an account of the Conservative Party’s failure,particularly after the defeat of 1997, to face up to what was needed to win, and itssustained diversion from the politics of electioneering by the need, or the desire, to satisfyideological purity and appease the aspirations, and even more so the aversions, of theparty’s ideological core in parliament, the country, and the press. Bale describes both theparochialism of the parliamentary world and the fluidity of the overlaps between party,parliament, the media, the party in the country, and the electorate.The world in whichparty leaders made their decisions was, he argues, both wider and narrower than isfrequently supposed. And whereas for the electorate the principal issues were health,education, and the economy, for the fluid world of the party, the European Union andthe single European currency dominated the argument, with crime, immigration andtaxation forming a trilogy of fear and antagonism. Bale’s account is full of instanceswhere preference trumped evidence, and where politicians could not bring themselves tobelieve that what the electorate valued was anything more than the result of the failureadequately to inform or persuade, and that what the party ideologues want, and oppose,is what the voters would want and oppose after one more persuasive heave.There havebeen as many believers in the false consciousness of ordinary people on the right as everthere were amongst Marxists, and the justification that if only people understood, or hadthings properly explained to them, they would agree with the ideologues, is employedright across the political spectrum.

But if there is support in Bale’s account for the role of ideology, there is support also forthe role, albeit in the widest possible sense, of rational calculation.Again and again in Bale’snarrative the immediate needs of political survival trump the long-term strategy ofelectoral success, and the need to appease the right-wing core of the wider party,irrespective of the policy and tactical preferences of the leadership, results in alienating theelectorate or confirming their suspicions of the Conservatives as slashers of public services.

Bale then sets out to explain the apparent turn around of Conservative electoralfortunes, and Cameron’s change of the party’s dominant narrative to take account ofwhat he describes as the electorate’s priority concern of education, health, and theeconomy. Cameron’s success in what Bale describes as ‘decontaminating’ the publicimage of his party illustrates the importance of political identity as a factor distinct fromany utilitarian assessment of policy. Bale cites opinion surveys where a policy was reactedto with greater hostility once it was associated with the Conservative Party.The reversalof the electoral positions of the Labour and the Conservative Parties was achieved in the

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first place through a change in the confectionary rather than the cake, enabling the partyto continue to favour markets over public provision, but without appearing to be goingdown the old, and unpopular, road of privatisation and cuts. At the same time, theembedded antagonistic Conservatism of attacking immigration, crime, and tax wasreplaced by a caring Conservatism which hugged society as it was, especially thosemembers of it whom the traditional right had demonised. Cameron orchestrated theremodelled presentation of his party with skill. There is a recurring tension in politicalrhetoric between attacking real, supposed, or exaggerated enemies and providing positiveaccounts, lacking in resentment or envy, of oneself and one’s friends. For antagonisticConservatives, even Cameron’s attribution of professional dedication to public servantscaused offence and alarm, led by what Bale calls the party in the media.

Bale writes in an almost conversational style, so that reading the book is often likelistening to an accomplished lecturer who does not need to rely on notes. His sourcesare eclectic, both the precisely-focused studies of historians and political scientists, and arich body of interviews with politicians of one kind and another. The robust publiccomments of politicians in the press, radio and television, on which Bale so effectivelydraws, illustrates how unjustified is the charge that Conservatism is either a stupid or asilent disposition.

This important book reminds the reader of the persistence of ideology, and of how itcan frustrate the ambitions of those whose political energies it enthuses. The book is atribute to the true legacy of Machiavelli. Politics is certainly about gaining, retaining, andusing, power. But the motive for all this is not some measurable maximisation of universal,uniform, and material interest, but a kaleidoscopic and historically-specific application ofbeliefs, aspirations and strategies.The story which Bale tells in this manner is all the morefascinating because at moment after moment the possibility is clear that things might haveturned out differently. Ideology certainly gets its proper due in this account, but it sharescausality with many other factors, so that if a study of its character, application andconsequences is a science, the appropriate science is the science of history.

RODNEY BARKERLondon School of Economics

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The Conservative Party: From Thatcher to Cameron – By Tim Bale

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