‘You ask me what a Lit de justice is? I will tell you!’ Thus exclaimed Louis-Adrien Le Paige, an eighteenth-century parlementaire who was excoriating the current spectacle of the king's appearance in person in the Grand-Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. Denied their ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation in important affairs of state, which in their view meant an active or participatory role in the legislative process, magistrates like Le Paige felt coerced in 1756 into the passive role of registering policies presented to them as faits accomplis. And thus also opens Professor Sarah Hanley's penetrating and revisionist study of this complex ceremony where monarch and magistrates met together in the legislative arena: the lit de justice. In a tour de force of painstaking scholarship Professor Hanley has convincingly proved that this ceremony, in which the king personally appeared in Parlement and sat on a specially decorated ‘seat of justice’, had evolved out of legend and myth. The lit de justice did not, as generations of parlementaires like Le Paige had claimed, emerge in the middle ages shortly after the creation of the court itself in the late thirteenth century. As Professor Hanley shows, the first such ceremony did not occur until much later, in the reign of Francis I in 1527. More importantly, she demonstrates that at its inception the lit de justice was not associated in any way with the adversarial scene depicted by Le Paige in 1756, with the king forcing his will on a recalcitrant court by making a personal appearance in the Grand-Chambre in order to force the registration of unpopular legislation.

On the morning of Wednesday, 24 February 1585, a bill ‘for imploying of Landes and Tenementes given to the Maintenance of Highewayes, Bridges etc.’ was read in the house of common for the seond time and committed for consideration by several members that afternoon in the hall of the Middle Temple. The committee decided to introduce a completely new measure which was itself committed after the second reading on 9 March. At one point in these proceedings William Fleetwood, recorder of London, told the lower house that he had advised the bill's promoter to make it ‘a private bill but he would not and therfor he shall see what will come of it’. Undoubtedly irked at this refusal to accept his advice, Fleetwood may have felt some satisfaction when the bill was rejected on its third reading in the lower house. Nevertheless, the bill's promoter had good reason to introduce his measure as a public rather than as a private bill. Private bills were expensive. Fees were payable at every stage, for the reading, committing, engrossing and endorsing such bills, and then, if all went well, fees had to be paid if the promoter wanted the bill printed and thus made public. Besides the cost, private bills stood less chance of getting through both houses of parliament. Not only was there a great risk of one's measure getting swamped by the large number of private bills always introduced in the first few weeks of a session, but it was also frequently asserted that private bills should have low priority on the agenda of parliament.

For a brief time at the beginning of James I's reign purveyance appeared as the greatest grievance of the commonwealth, troubling the first two sessions of his first parliament. So much has long been known, but only recently has it been revealed how far the commons thought of going. The bills read in the house in 1604 and 1606, almost certainly identical or nearly so, did not look merely to remedy the abuses of purveyors, but to abolish purveyance itself – the king's right to be served provisions and carriage at prices below those current in the markets – which the house discovered was explicitly prohibited by numerous medieval statutes. The commons' refusal in the two sessions to buy the king out of his prerogative with a ‘composition’ was not then irresponsible, as one historian has suggested. The house could not readily agree to purchase what it had learned the king had no right to sell. The radical challenge to the king's prerogative embodied in the commons' bill, Dr Croft has recently argued, doomed the composition proposed by James's ministers. Instead, the house pursued its claims with ‘remarkable tenacity’, especially in 1606, when it passed the bill twice.

At the very end of December 1780 Britain formally broke off diplomatic relations with the Dutch Republic. The war which followed – the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–84 – abruptly ended more than a century of friendship and alliance between the two states. It also proved to be a turning point in the Republic's domestic history: the shattering defeats inflicted by the superior British navy powerfully assisted the development of the Patriot movement, which was to break the mould of Dutch politics during the 1780s.

According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?

On 7 December 1916 David Lloyd George became prime minister, leading the second coalition government of the war. No archival sources of significance remain to be consulted to help explain how and why the particular composition of the new government emerged. A great deal has been written on the first years of the war, from many perspectives, but a satisfactory political history of Asquith's two administrations remains to be crafted. A sustained narrative, set in the appropriate context, which relates the political significance of the issues to the drama of politics, to the way individuals lose office and governments fall, which establishes trends, and measures cumulative effects is still unwritten.

Within a few months of Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor (30 January 1933), opposition was driven underground. Illegally organized opposition was on the whole destroyed by the Gestapo (secret state police); opposition within the establishment (vice-chancellor von Papen, SA chief of staff Röhm) was suppressed in a round of murders; the rest was gradually intimidated, as in the case of the churches. The opposition surviving underground could not act effectively to change the regime. It became clear that in the Nazi police state opposition could not be effective without support from the principal non-Nazi force in the nation, the army.