Modules Taught

The Long Parliament
The Long Parliament was first called by King Charles I on 3 November 1640, six months after the dissolution of the Short Parliament and within weeks of the defeat of the English in the Bishops' Wars against Scotland. The King was reluctant to summon another Parliament but the expense of the wars had left him desperately short of money and in urgent need of parliamentary subsidies.
The Long Parliament sat throughout the First and Second Civil wars until December 1648, when it was purged by the New Model Army. The Purged Parliament (or the "Rump" of the Long Parliament) was expelled by Oliver Cromwell in April 1653. The Long Parliament was reinstated in February 1660 after the fall of the Cromwellian Protectorate and was formally dissolved on 16 March 1660.
Prelude to Civil War 1640-2
During the early sessions of the Long Parliament, opposition to the King's policies was orchestrated by John Pym who focused his criticism upon the King's advisers rather than the King himself. At Pym's instigation, the Earl of StraffordArchbishop Laud were denounced as "evil councillors" and impeached within weeks of the Long Parliament first assembling.
During1641, a series of reforms was carried out to abolish the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission and other institutions that had allowed King Charles to circumvent the common law and to rule without calling a Parliament during his eleven-year Personal Rule(1629-40).
Financial measures of dubious legality, such as ship-money, forced loans and destraint of knighthood, were also abolished. The Triennial Act was passed in January 1641 to ensure that Parliament would be called at least once every three years. The reforms carried out by the Long Parliament before the outbreak of the civil wars eventually formed the basis of the Restoration Settlement in the 1660s. The abolition of the prerogative courts and of the Crown's right to raise money by arbitrary means were important steps towards the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy of modern Britain.
The Irish Uprising of October 1641 brought into sharp focus the critical issue of whether the armed forces should be controlled by the King or by Parliament. Pym and his supporters drafted the Grand Remonstrance in an attempt to undermine confidence in the King and his advisers; a new Militia Bill was proposed in Parliament but this was strenuously resisted by the King. Matters came to a head in January 1642 with the failure of the King's attempt to arrest the Five Members whom he regarded as his leading opponents in Parliament. In March, the Long Parliament decreed that its own ordinances were valid and legally binding without the need for the King's assent. With the complete breakdown of dialogue between King and Parliament, civil war became inevitable.
The First Civil War 1642-6
From 1642-4, Parliament's war-effort was directed by a specially appointed commission known as the Committee of Safety. After Parliament's military alliance with the Scots, the Committee of Safety was superseded by the Committee for Both Kingdoms. Around one-third of the members House of Commons and most of the House of Lords left Westminster to join the King's alternative Oxford Parliament in 1643. From 1645 onwards, "recruiter" elections were held to "recruit" or make up the numbers of MPs at Westminster.
Money to finance Parliament's war-effort was raised initially through loans from City financiers. In November 1642, John Pym introduced the first of several innovatory financial measures with an ordinance for an assessment tax on property to be levied in London. This was the first time that Parliament had imposed a tax without the consent of a monarch. The assessment was gradually extended throughout all areas of England under parliamentary control. In March 1643, Pym introduced an ordinance for the sequestration (confiscation) of the estates of Royalist "malignants", and in July 1643 the excise ordinance imposed a purchase tax on many common goods and commodities. From early 1644,further funds were raised by the process of "compounding", whereby those whose estates had been sequestered paid a fee to Parliament to recover them.
Under Pym's direction, Parliament organised local government through a system of county committees that were responsible for directing the general affairs of each county.Additional committees were set up to administer sequestered estates, to oversee the clergy and to levy the assessment and excise. Membership of the various committees often consisted of the same people, and in some counties powerful individuals emerged who dominated the county administration such as Sir John Gell in Derbyshire and William Purefoy in Warwickshire. Local justice continued to be administered by the High Sheriff and Justices of the Peace in each county, and local militias continued to be organised by commissioners for the militia.
During the course of the First Civil War, members of the Long Parliament became divided over whether hostilities should be settled by negotiation with the King or by inflicting a decisive military defeat on him. The "peace party" developed into the Presbyterian faction in Parliament; the militant "war party" was associated with the Independents.
These factions were also divided by their differing approaches to religion: the Presbyterians tended to favour a national church, while the Independents advocated the separation of church and state. However,the Presbyterians and Independents were not organised political parties in the modern sense and few MPs consistently supported one side or the other. A third "middle group" has been identified which was initially associated with John Pym and which sought to bridge the conflicting policies of the war and peace parties.
The Purged Parliament
After the end of the First Civil War, the victorious New Model Army became a political force in its own right. The army's involvement in the political process began over the reluctance of the Presbyterian majority in Parliament to settle arrears of pay and other grievances of the soldiers. After the Second Civil War in 1648, the army, with the connivance of some Independent MPs, carried out Pride's Purge to exclude Presbyterian sympathisers. The purged Parliament became popularly known as the Rump Parliament. This body governed the republican Commonwealth after the execution of King Charles and the abolition of the Monarchy and the House of Lords. However, army leaders grew impatient with Parliament's slow implementation of radical policies, and the Rump was expelled in April 1653, to be replaced by the short-lived Nominated AssemblyProtectorate of Oliver Cromwell.
The Rump Parliament met again after Cromwell's death and the collapse of the Protectorate in 1659. The surviving members who had been excluded at Pride's Purge were recalled in February 1660, thus restoring the Long Parliament for its final session. This body voted on 16 March 1660 to dissolve the Long Parliament and to hold new elections. The pro-Royalist Convention Parliament that assembled in April 1660 prepared the way for the Restoration of the monarchy.

Wars of the Roses, traditional name given to the intermittent struggle (1455–85) for the throne of England between the noble houses of York (whose badge was a white rose) and Lancaster (later associated with the red rose).About the middle of the 15th cent. Richard, duke of York, came to the fore as leader of the opposition to the faction (William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk; Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset; and the queen, Margaret of Anjou) that controlled the weak Lancastrian king Henry VI.The Yorkists gained popular support as a result of discontent over thefailure of English arms in the Hundred Years War and over thecorruption of the court, discontent reflected in the rebellion of Jack Cade in 1450. Also in that year Suffolk was murdered, and the duke of Yorkforced the king to recognize his claim as heir to the throne. In 1453 the king became insane, and the birth of a son to Margaret of Anjoudisplaced York as heir. The duke was appointed protector, but when theking recovered in 1454, York was excluded from the royal council. He resorted to arms.The opposing factions met (1455) at St.Albans—usually taken as the first battle of the Wars of the Roses.Somerset was killed, leaving Queen Margaret at the head of the defeated royal party, and York again served as protector for a short period (1455–56). By 1459 both parties were once more in arms. The following year the Yorkists defeated and captured the king at the battle of Northampton. The duke of York hurried to London to assert his claims to the throne, which were, by laws of strict inheritance, perhaps better than those of the king himself. A compromise was effected by which Henry remained king and York and his heirs were declared successors.
Queen Margaret, whose son was thus disinherited, raised an army and defeated (1460) the Yorkists at Wakefield. York was killed in this battle, and his claims devolved upon his son Edward, but Richard Neville, earl of Warwick,became the real leader of the Yorkist party. Margaret's army rescued the king from captivity in the second battle of St. Albans (Feb.,1461), but Edward meanwhile secured a Yorkist victory at Mortimer's Cross, marched into London unopposed, and assumed the throne as Edward IV.
The Lancastrians, after their defeat at Towton (Mar., 1461), continued (with Scottish aid) to raise resistance in the north until 1464. The deposed Henry was captured (1465) and put into the Tower of London.Although the Lancastrian cause now seemed hopeless, a quarrel broke out between Warwick and Edward IV after the latter's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville in 1464. Warwick and the king's brother George, duke of Clarence,allied against Edward, fled to France (1470), and there became reconciled with Margaret of Anjou. Supported by Louis XI of France,they crossed to England and restored Henry VI to the throne. Edward fled, but with the aid of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, returned to England in 1471, regained London, and recaptured Henry. In the ensuing battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury (1471), Warwick and Henry's son, Edward, were killed. Margaret was imprisoned. Soon thereafter Henry VI died, probably slain at the orders of Edward IV. After 12 relatively peaceful years, Edward IV was succeeded (1483) by his young son Edward V, but soon the boy's uncle Richard, duke of Gloucester, usurped the throne as Richard III.Opposition to Richard advanced the fortunes of Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, now the Lancastrian claimant. In 1485, Henry landed from France, defeated and killed Richard at Bosworth Field, and ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Henry VII's marriage to Edward IV's daughter, Elizabeth, united the houses of Lancaster and York. Except for various efforts during Henry's reign to place Yorkist pretenders on the throne, the Wars of the Roses were ended. It is generally said that with them ended the era of feudalism in England, since the nobles who participated suffered heavy loss of life and property and were too weak, as a class, to contest the strong monarchy of the Tudors. The middle and lower classes were largely indifferent to the struggle and relatively untouched by it.

The House of Lords

(Photograph taken from across the river.)
There are more than 1,000 rooms and more than two miles of corridors!
The clock tower is the most photographed part of the Houses of Parliament. It houses five bells. The biggest and most famous bell is called Big Ben.

• a verb (He drove slowly. — How did he drive?)
  
• an adjective (He drove a very fast car. — How fast was his car?)
  
• another adverb (She moved quite slowly down the aisle. — How slowly did she move?)
  

As we will see, adverbs often tell when, where, why, or under whatconditions something happens or happened. Adverbs frequently end in -ly; however, many words and phrases not ending in -ly serve an adverbial function and an -ly ending is not a guarantee that a word is an adverb. The words lovely, lonely, motherly, friendly, neighborly, for instance, are adjectives:

• That lovely woman lives in a friendly neighborhood.
  

If a group of words containing a subject and verb acts as an adverb (modifying the verb of a sentence), it is called an Adverb Clause:

• When this class is over, we're going to the movies.
  When a group of words not containing a subject and verb acts as an adverb, it is called an adverbial phrase. Prepositional phrases frequently have adverbial functions (telling place and time, modifying the verb):
  
• He went to the movies.
  
• She works on holidays.
  
• They lived in Canada during the war.
  

A handful of adverbs have two forms, one that ends in -ly and one that doesn't. In certain cases, the two forms have different meanings:

• He arrived late.
  
  
• Lately, he couldn't seem to be on time for anything.
  

In most cases, however, the form without the -ly ending should be reserved for casual situations:

• She certainly drives slow in that old Buick of hers.
  
• He did wrong by her.
  
• He spoke sharp, quick, and to the point.
  

Adverbs often function as intensifiers, conveying a greater or lesser emphasis to something. Intensifiers are said to have three different functions: they can emphasize, amplify, or downtone. Here aresome examples:
Emphasizers:

• I really don't believe him.
  
• He literally wrecked his mother's car.
  
  
• She simply ignored me.
  
  
• They're going to be late, for sure.
  

Amplifiers:

• The teacher completely rejected her proposal.
  
  
• I absolutely refuse to attend any more faculty meetings.
  
  
• They heartily endorsed the new restaurant.
  
  
• I so wanted to go with them.
  
  
• We know this city well.
  

Downtoners:

• I kind of like this college
  
• Joe sort of felt betrayed by his sister.
  
• His mother mildly disapproved his actions.
  
  
• We can improve on this to some extent.
  
  
• The boss almost quit after that.
  
  
• The school was all but ruined by the storm.
  

In simplest terms, prepositional phrases consist of a preposition and an object of a preposition. Prepositions are indeclinable words that introduce the object of a prepositional phrase. Indeclinable words are words that have only one possible form. For example, below is a preposition, but belows or belowing are not possible forms of below.
The noun phrase or pronoun that follows the preposition is called the object of the preposition. For example, behind the couch is a prepositional phrase where behind is the preposition and the noun phrase the couch acts as the object of the preposition. Sometimes adjectives are used to further modify the object of the preposition, as in behind the big old smelly green couch.
Formal Functions of Prepositions

Look at the boat with the blue sail.
Please hand me the pen next to the telephone.
Park the car beside the fence.

The park is next to the hospital.
The student is between an A and a B.
The fight scene is before the second act.

In this example, the prepositional phrase on his bed indicates a spatial relationship between the subject dog and the object bed. If the preposition on was replaced with under or beneath the spatial relationship would be altered.
The town hasn't been the same since the war.

The novel takes place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and is split into four sections. The first is from the viewpoint of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three year old man with mental retardation. The second segment is set eighteen years earlier than the other three and is told from the point of view of Quentin Compson, the Harvard-educated student who commits suicide after a series of events involving his sister Caddy. The third is from the point of view of their cynical,embittered brother, Jason, and the fourth is from a third-person-limited-omniscient narrative point-of-view focused on Dilsey, the Compson family's black servant, and her unbiased point of view, which allows the reader to make his or her own assumptions from the actions of the other characters. Jason is also a focus in the section, but Faulkner gives glimpses of thoughts and actions from everyone in the family. The story overall summarizes the lives of people in the Compson family that has by now fallen into ruin.Many passages are written in a stream of consciousness. This novel is a classic example of the unreliable narrator technique.Most immediately obvious is the idea of a Tale told by an idiot" ,in this case Benjy,whose version of the compsons'story opens the novel. This idea can also be extended to the other two narrators,Quentin and Jason, whose narratives display their own respective varieties of idiocy. More to the point, however, the novel is recounting the death of a family, including some of its members, as well as the decline of the traditional upper-class Southern family.This is the significance of "The way to dusty death". The last line is,perhaps, the most meaningful; Faulkner later says in his speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that people must write about things that come from the heart, or"universal truths". Otherwise, he states, the ideas published signify nothing.

The four parts of the novel relate many of the same episodes, each from a different point of view and therefore with emphasis on different themes and events. This interweaving and nonlinear structure makes any true synopsis of the novel difficult, especially since the narrators are all unreliable in their own way, making their accounts not necessarily trustworthy at all times. Also in this novel, Faulkner uses italics to indicate points in each section where the narrative is moving into a significant moment in the past. The use of these italics can be confusing, however, as time shifts are not always marked by the use of italics, and periods of different time in each section do not necessarily stay in italics for the duration of the flashback. Thus,these time shifts can often be jarring and confusing, calling for the necessity of a particularly close reading.The general outline of the story is the decline of the Compson family, a once noble Southern family descended from U.S. Civil War hero General Compson. The family falls victim to those vices which Faulkner believed were responsible for the problems in the reconstructed South: racism, avarice, selfishness, the psychological inability of individuals to become determinants. Over the course of the thirty years or so related in the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson, and many of them die tragically.The reader may also wish to look in The Portable Faulkner for a four-page history of the Compson family. Faulkner said afterwards that he wished he had written the history at the same time he wrote The Sound and the Fury.

The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his mental retardation;the only characters who evidence a genuine care for him are Caddy, his older sister; and Dilsey, a matriarchal servant. His narrative voice is characterized predominantly by its nonlinearity: spanning the period 1898-1928, Benjy's narrative is a pastiche of events presented in a seamless stream of consciousness. The presence of italics in Benjy's section is meant to indicate significant shifts in the narrative. Originally Faulkner meant to use different colored inks to signify chronological breaks. This nonlinearity makes the style of this section particularly challenging, but Benjy's style develops a cadence that, while not chronologically coherent, provides unbiased insight into many characters' true motivations. Moreover, Benjy's caretaker changes to indicate the time period: Luster in the present, T.P. in Benjy's teenage years, and Versh during Benjy's infancy and childhood.In this section we see Benjy's three passions: fire, the golf course on land that used to belong to the Compson family, and his sister Caddy. But by 1928 Caddy has been banished from the Compson home after her husband divorced her because her child was not his, and the family has sold his favorite pasture to a local golf club in order to financ Quentin's Harvard education. In the opening scene, Benjy, accompanied by Luster, a servant boy, watches golfers on the nearby golf course as he waits to hear them call "caddie" - the name of his favorite sibling. When one of them calls for his golf caddie, Benjy's mind embarks on a whirlwind course of memories of his sister, Caddy, focusing on one critical scene. In 1898 when their grandmother died, the four Compson children were forced to play outside during the funeral. In order to see what was going on inside, Caddy climbed a tree in the yard, and while looking inside, her brothers—Quentin, Jason and Benjy—looked up and noticed that her underwear was muddy. How each of them reacts to this is the first insight the reader has into the trends that will shape the lives of these boys: Jason is disgusted, Quentin is appalled,and Benjy seems to have a "sixth-sense" in that he moans (he is unable to speak using words), as if sensing the symbolic nature of Caddy's dirtiness, which hints at her later sexual promiscuity. At the time the children were aged 9 (Quentin), 7 (Caddy), 5 (Jason) and 3 (Benjy).Other crucial memories in this section are Benjy's change of name (fromMaury, after his uncle) in 1900 upon the discovery of his disability; the marriage and divorce of Caddy (1910), and Benjy's castration,resulting from an attack on a girl that is alluded to briefly within this chapter when a gate is left unlatched and Benjy is out unsupervised. Readers often report trouble understanding this portion of the novel due to its impressionistic language, necessitated by Benjamin's retardation, and its frequent shifts in time and setting.
Part 2: June 2, 1910

Narrated by Quentin, the most intelligent and most tortured of the Compson children, the second part is probably the novel's finest example of Faulkner's narrative technique. In this section we see Quentin, a freshman at Harvard University, wander the streets of Cambridge,contemplating death and remembering his family's estrangement from his sister Caddy. Like the first section, the plot is not strictly linear, although the two interweaving storylines of Quentin at Harvard on the one hand and his memories on the other are clearly discernible.Quentin's main obsession is Caddy's virginity and purity. He is obsessed with old Southern ideals of honor and therefore is extremely protective of womenfolk, especially his sister. Therefore, when Caddy engages in sexual promiscuity, Quentin is horrified. He turns to his father for help and advice, but cynical Mr. Compson tells Quentin that virginity is invented by men and therefore should not be taken seriously. He also tells Quentin that time will heal all. Quentin spends much of his day trying to prove his father wrong, but is unable to. Shortly before Quentin left for Harvard in the fall of 1909, Caddy became pregnant with the child of Dalton Ames who is confronted by Quentin. The two fight, with Quentin losing horribly and Caddy vowing to never speak to Dalton again for Quentin's sake. Quentin tells his father that they have committed incest, but his father knows that he is lying: "and he did you try to make her do it and i i was afraid to i was afraid she might and then it wouldn't do any good"(112). Quentin's idea of incest is wrapped around the idea that, if they "could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us" (51), he could protect his sister by joining her in whatever punishment/hardship/retribution she would be forced to endure. In his mind, he felt a need to take responsibility for Caddy's sin. Pregnant and alone, Caddy then marries Herbert Head, whom Quentin finds repulsive but Caddy is resolute: she must marry before the birth of her child. Herbert however finds out that the child is not his and sends mother and daughter away in shame. Quentin's wanderings through Harvard, as he cuts class, follow the pattern of his heartbreak over losing Caddy. For instance, he meets a small Italian immigrant girl who speaks no English. He significantly calls her "sister" and spends much of the day trying to communicate with her, and to care for her by finding her home, to no avail. He thinks sadly of the downfall and squalor of the South after the American Civil War. Ultimately, Quentin, unable to cope with the amorality of the world around him, commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Charles River after loading his jacket with flat-irons.While many first-time readers report Benjy's section as being difficult to understand, these same readers often find Quentin's section to be near impossible. Not only do chronological events mesh together regularly, but often (especially at the end) Faulkner completely disregards any semblance of grammar, spelling, or punctuation, instead writing in a rambling series of words, phrases, and sentences that have no separation to indicate where one thought ends and another begins. This confusion is due to Quentin's severe depression and deteriorating state of mind. The section is therefore ironic in that Quentin is an even more unreliable narrator than his brother Benjy was. Because of the staggering complexity of this section, it is often the one most extensively studied by scholars of the novel.
Part 3: April 6, 1928

The third portion is narrated by Jason, the youngest and least likeable of the Compson children. This section takes place the daybefore Benjy's section, on Good Friday. Of the three brothers who narrate a section, Jason's account is the most straightforward, reflecting his single-minded and calculated desire for material wealth.By 1928, Jason is the economic foundation of the family after his father's death. He supports his mother, Benjy, and Miss Quentin (Caddy's daughter) as well as the family of servants. This role has made him bitter and cynical, with little sign of the passionate sensitivity that defined his older brother or sister. He goes so far as to blackmail Caddy into making him Miss Quentin's sole guardian, then uses that role to steal the support payments that Caddy sends for her daughter.This is the first portion that is narrated in a linear fashion. It follows the course of Good Friday--a day in which Jason decides to leave work to search for Miss Quentin (Caddy's daughter), who has run away again, seemingly in pursuit of mischief. Here we see most immediately the conflict between the two predominant traits of the Compson family (which Jason's mother Caroline attributes to the difference between her and her husband's blood): on the one hand, Miss Quentin's recklessness and passion, inherited from her father and,ultimately, the Compson side; on the other, Jason's ruthless cynicism, drawn from his Mother's side. This section also gives us the clearest image of domestic life in the Compson household, which for Jason and the servants means the care of Caroline the hypochondriac and of Benjy.
Part 4: April 8, 1928

April 8, 1928, not coincidentally, was Easter Sunday. This section, the only without a single first person narrator,focuses on Dilsey, the powerful matriarch of the black servant family.She, in contrast to the declining Compsons, draws a tremendous amount of strength from herself and her faith, and thus stands as a proud figure amidst a dying family. It can be said that Dilsey gains her strength by looking outward (i.e. outside of one's self for support) while the Compsons grow weak by looking inward, thus imploding on themselves.On Easter, she takes her family and Benjy to the 'colored' church for the Easter service. Through her we see, in a sense, the consequences of the decadence and depravity in which the Compsons have lived for decades. Dilsey is mistreated and abused, but nevertheless remains loyal. She is the only one who cares for Benjy, as she takes him to church and tries to bring him to salvation. The preacher's sermon inspires her to weep for the Compson family, reminding her that she's seen the family through its destruction, which she is now witnessing.Meantime, the tension between Jason and Miss Quentin reaches its inevitable conclusion: the family discovers that Miss Quentin has run away in the middle of the night with a carnival worker, in the process breaking into Jason's hidden stash of cash in his closet and taking both her money (the support from Caddy, which Jason had stolen) and her money-obsessed uncle's life savings. Jason calls the police and tells them that his money has been stolen, but since it would mean admitting embezzling Quentin's money he doesn't press the issue. He therefore sets off to once again find her on his own, but loses her trail in nearby Mottson and gives her up as gone for good.The novel ends with a very powerful and unsettling image. After church, Dilsey allows her grandson Luster to drive Benjy in the family's decrepit horse and carriage (another sign of decay) to the graveyard. Luster, not caring that Benjy is so entrenched in the routine of his life that even the slightest change in route will enrage him, drives the wrong way around a monument. Benjy's hysterical sobbing and violent outburst can only be quieted by Jason, of all people, who understands how best to placate his brother. Jason slaps Luster, turns the carriage around, and Benjy suddenly becomes silent. Luster turns around to look at Benjy and sees Benjy drop his flower. Benjy's eyes are "...empty and blue and serene again."