IN a vigorously argued paper, Mr J. P. Cooper has attacked my interpretation of Henry VII's reign.1 If the point at issue were only Mr Cooper's view of my methods and scholarship—or, for that matter, my view of his—I should feel neither justified nor inclined to trouble anyone again with these problems. But Mr Cooper is almost as much concerned to prove Henry VII rapacious as he is sure that I am wrong; and the truth about Henry VII's government deserves all the elucidation it may need. If, therefore, I reluctantly recur to an argument in which I have already had an extended say, it is because I believe Mr Cooper to be in error on a matter of first-rate importance; I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents.2 A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest.

It is a text-book commonplace that Josiah Wedgwood was amongst the pioneers of English factory organization—the discipline of workers, the division of labour, and the systematization of production—but his work in these fields has never been examined in detail. Sixty thousand Wedgwood manuscripts, organized on a geographical basis for the sake of modern area advertisement rather than for the convenience of the historian, perhaps explain this neglect. The papers have not been ignored, but they have been sifted rather than studied in detail. Certain generalizations have emerged from this hit-or-miss investigation. In the articles of three visiting North American historians, Hower, Bladen and Schofield, and in the work of Thomas (essentially concerned with the history of the whole of the Potteries), the embryonic and incomplete skeleton of Wedgwood's methods has been laid bare, but much of the flesh has been discarded in the process.

The fear of revolution, which was to play such an important part in early nineteenth-century English history, was felt for the first time in 1792. Before that year there had been constant fear of disorder, and frequent riots had demonstrated that the forces of order could at times be set at naught and property endangered. In 1792, however, propertied classes and government began to fear not sporadic and localized outbursts of violence, but an alleged nation-wide conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of both property and government, and the end of social subordination.

Dr J. H. Plumb'S recent paper to the Royal Historical Society produced positive proof that the ‘lords of the committee’ of the early eighteenth century were simply the members of the cabinet when meeting by themselves in Whitehall instead of in the presence of the queen at one of the royal palaces.1 With this identification now certain, an investigation is possible into those specialist sub-committees which appear to have been responsible for naval and military affairs at various times under Anne, and about which, in Dr Plumb's own words, ‘further evidence would be invaluable’.2 One such body was the ‘committee of council which sits at the war-office ‘, the existence of which is attested by two letters of 1711 from Henry St John, then secretary of state, to the duke of Marlborough.3 Almost nothing has been discovered about this committee, although its existence has been well known to historians for more than fifty years,4 but now a search of war-office and other records has produced sufficient evidence for the committee to be identified and its membership, procedure, function, and history ascertained.

By the middle years of the nineteenth century, Englishmen were in full revolt against the principle of centralization. Parliament's experiments in centralized administration had almost all ended in failure. A powerful and independent Poor Law Commission had given way, in 1847, to a more timid Poor Law Board under ministerial and parliamentary control. A strong Board of Health, ruled by that uncompromising centralizer and bureaucrat, Edwin Chadwick, was sheared of a large part of its influence when, in 1854, the government decided to release Chadwick from their employment. The Times responded to this event with a jubilant leader article which announced that, ‘If there is such a thing as a political certainty among us, it is that nothing autocratic can exist in this country.... Mr Chadwick and Dr Southwood Smith, have been deposed, and we prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest than be bullied into health’.

In April 1904, Emile Loubet, the French president of the Republic, visited the king of Italy in Rome. His visit occasioned a strongly-worded note of protest from the Vatican to the governments of other Catholic nations, and as a result the French ambassador was recalled. Ten weeks later, following a dispute involving the bishops of Dijon and Laval, diplomatic relations between the French government and the Vatican were broken off altogether, not to be resumed for sixteen years, and in the following year, 1905, a law of 9 December abolished Napoleon’s Concordat and separated Church and State in France.