Even though so much has so often been done, the study of parliament remains active, not least so for the sixteenth century. A fresh look at the present state of the question seems appropriate on this occasion when we are assembled to commemorate Sir John Neale, the foremost historian of the Tudor House of Commons. It is now nearly twenty years since Neale completed his life's work, and those twenty years have not been without further study and thought, sometimes assisted by the discovery of new evidence. No one, we may be sure, would have been better pleased than today's honorand to find that what so fully engaged his interest and his labours should continue to attract his successors – to know that he had not closed a book but opened a window.

‘Supremacy and Uniformity’, wrote A. F. Pollard, ‘occupied less of the time of parliament [in 1559] … than did the scramble for episcopal lands …’ This fact, apparent to anyone who glances at the Journal of the House of Commons for 1559, has been ignored by historians who wrote before Pollard and by those who wrote after him. Concerned only with bills dealing with religion, scholars failed to recognize that proposals concerning the distribution of ecclesiastical lands dominated the session. During the two months before Easter private land bills monopolized the Commons' time for three weeks, ruining any timetable the government might have had and helping to persuade, if not forcing, the queen to continue the session after Easter.

In March 1786 a special envoy from Great Britain, William Eden, notified the French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, of his arrival. Eden's appearance in France represented the culmination of three years of careful diplomacy designed to force the British government into serious commercial negotiations. Ostensibly, the negotiators were to replace the moribund commercial convention of Utrecht (1713) with a new agreement that would extend Anglo-French trade. But for Vergennes, the negotiations involved more than trade: they formed an essential part of his post-war English policy – a policy designed to maintain British isolation and demonstrate the possibilities of Anglo-French co-operation while bringing Great Britain under French influence through penetration of the British economy. Discussions during the next ten months produced a commercial treaty, an additional convention and a draft consular agreement. When the new commercial arrangements were promulgated in May 1787, the French economy was depressed and the French government was in disarray following the death of Vergennes and the dismissal of two other ministers. Hopes for rapprochement vanished when the Dutch crisis ended in a French humiliation at British hands a few months later, but the treaty continued to govern Anglo-French commercial relations until 1793.

The legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established. Almost every scientist knows – and every viewer of the BBC's recent programme on Darwin was shown – how Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, attempted to pour scorn on Darwin's Origin of species at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and had the tables turned on him by T. H. Huxley. In this memorable encounter Huxley's simple scientific sincerity humbled the prelatical insolence and clerical obscurantism of Soapy Sam; the pretension of the Church to dictate to scientists the conclusions they were allowed to reach were, for good and all, decisively defeated, the autonomy of science was established in Britain and the western world, the claim of plain unvarnished truth on men's allegiance was vindicated, however unwelcome its implications for human vanity might be, and the flood tide of Victorian faith in all its fulsomeness was turned to an ebb, which has continued to our present day and will only end when religion and superstition have been finally eliminated from the minds of all enlightened men. Even churchmen concede that it was a disastrous defeat. Only Owen Chadwick strikes a note of caution, observing that the account given of the incident in Wilberforce's biography seems hardly consistent with an overwhelming defeat, and maintaining that the received account must be a largely legendary creation of a later date.

In recent times the historiography of the Wilhelmine Reich has clearly reflected the influence of Eckart Kehr and of later historians who have adopted and developed his work. The Rankean dogma of the Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy) has been replaced by a new slogan, Primat der Innenpolitik (primacy of domestic policy). The resultant interpretive scheme is by now quite familiar. The social structure of the Bismarckean Reich, it is said, was shaken to its foundations by the impact of industrialization. A growing class of industrialists sought to break the power of the feudal agrarian class, and a rapidly developing proletariat threatened to upset the status quo. The internecine struggle between industrialists and agrarians was dangerous for both and for the state, since the final beneficiary might be the proletariat. Consequently agrarians and industrialists closed their ranks against the common social democrat enemy and sought to tame the proletariat, which had grown restive under the impact of the depression, by means of a Weltpolitik which would obviate the effects of the depression, heal the economy, and vindicate the political system responsible for such impressive achievements. Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others call this diversionary strategy against the proletarian threat social imperialism; and this, it is said, is the domestic policy primarily responsible for Wilhelmine imperialism.

It is a commonplace among historians of the First World War that during this period Britain and America changed positions as dorninant and subordinate financial powers. The great gap in the histories, however, has been any description of how this came about, Historians of the period have generally relied on one book, E. V. Morgan's Studies in Brtish financial policy 1914–1925 (1952), with the occasional use of Henry F. Grady's British war finance, 1914–1919 (1923). Both are very useful, and within its field Morgan in particular will be difficult to supplant; but within the context of Anglo-American relations they only treat one side of the stroy. It is clear that during the war Britain was dependent increasingly on American finance, private and later public, both to supply her civilian and military populations and to fight the war; and further, that by late 1916 decisions taken in America could have a direct bearing on British ability to finance her own operations. Once America entered the war this influence became even more direct. Negotiations over finance largely took place in America, by means of temporary and permanent missions. This article will describe the most important of these missions, and trace the gradual change in the balance of British and American financial power.

One of the more remarkable features of the Second World War was the emergence of a ‘reforming consensus’ within the two major political parties in Britain. As Addison has pointed out ‘a massive new ground emerged in British polities’ and Conservative and Labour leaders alike openly began to espouse the case for ‘“pragmatic reform” in a mixed economy’. By 1945 the emphasis on social equity in ‘the people's war’ and the removal of lingering doubts as to Labour's fitness to govern, had combined with collective memories of the inter-war period, with its mass unemployment and social distress, to produce a new ‘left of centre’ consensus on the issue of postwar reconstruction. This applied not just to the maintenance of full employment and the inauguration of a ‘welfare state’, but also to the reorganization of certain industries. In this latter category by far the most appropriate illustration of the basic measure of agreement between the parties is provided by their approach to the reconstruction of the coalmining industry. As with other industrial sectors the Labour party was irrevocably committed to nationalization as the key element in its reconstruction programme. In this instance there was, of course, a major difference with the Conservatives who wished to retain, as far as possible, the basic principles of private enterprise. But divorced from the rhetoric of laissez-faire capitalism, what did this mean in practical terms? It is worth noting that the successive modifications during the thirties to the statutory cartel system instituted under part I of the Coal Mines Act, 1930, had been made at the instigation of a Conservative-dominated National government and had meant that the freedom of action of the individual colliery undertaking was severely circumscribed by 1939.

On 9 February 1933 the Oxford Union debated and carried by 275 votes to 153 the motion ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. After a few days this became a major news story, first in Britain then also in the world press: the British embassies in Madrid and Santiago cabled the Foreign Office in alarm at the appearance of the story in the Spanish and Chilean press. The motion was taken up also by student debating societies all over Britain and overseas: in the United States, for example, any pledge to take no part in war came to be known as the ‘Oxford pledge’ or the ‘Oxford oath’. Since the debate, which took place ten days after Hitler had become chancellor of Germany, appeared to contrast British liberal, pacifist effeteness with fascist martial virility it was seized on in Germany and Italy. The Liberal M.P. Robert Bernays told the house of commons how he had been asked about the debate later in 1933 by a prominent Nazi youth leader: ‘There was an ugly gleam in his eye when he said: “The fact is that you English are soft.”’ And on 7 July 1934 Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote from Geneva to the former Union president responsible for the debate: ‘I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill-starred Resolution. It is still going on sowing dragons’ teeth. If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault.

Divide et impera. So much of Western imperial behaviour reflected a wilful policy of ‘divide and rule’ in order first to establish and then to perpetuate control over subject peoples in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Accordingly the administration of foreign rule often amounted to artfully manipulating, emphasizing and exploiting local divergencies, whether tribal, sectional, ethnic or economic, and playing off one group or state against another. As a shorthand summary and epigram for imperialism divide et impera may be satisfactory. But it suggests merely one stage of the process: for in asserting its mastery over others the imperial power often opened itself to internal cleavages on the more technical question of exactly how to rule, or, during the decline of empire, whether or not to yield control. This was certainly the British experience. And one of the more dramatic manifestations of ‘divide and rule’ in reverse (‘rule and be divided’) came in 1937 in the instance of partition for Palestine.