The debate over the nature and significance of religious change in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England has been one of the most lively of recent years and shows no sign of abating. The emergence or otherwise of a Calvinist consensus, the impact of the high church or Arminian party, the role of puritanism, and the relationship between all these and the outbreak of the civil war have generated vigorous discussion. Attention has inevitably tended to focus on the theological outlook of university-educated clerics, whose sermons and treatises provide a mine of information. In the absence of comparable sources it is far harder to evaluate the position of laymen, and in the case of Robert Cecil it may seem exceptionally foolhardy to attempt to do so, since he has usually been depicted as both an enigmatic figure and a morally dubious one. Hurstfield confined his discussion to the Cecils' view of the right relationship between church and state, concluding merely that Robert Cecil followed his father Lord Burghley in supporting a via media. Yet it is possible to piece together a large amount of information about his spiritual development, and the evidence suggests a gradual but very significant change of outlook, from orthodox Elizabethan protestantism to a more complex position in which both his doctrinal and aesthetic sensibilities were moving in the direction later identified with Laudianism. Moreover, in the construction of his private chapel at Hatfield, and in his links with men such as Richard Neile and Samuel Harsnett, he can be seen as the first great patron of the emerging high church party, antedating Buckingham and Charles I by a generation. Tracing the religious evolution of Robert Cecil first earl of Salisbury thus illuminates some of the crucial changes reshaping English protestantism in these formative years.

‘To me he was always the embodiment of Cavalier romance.’ Thus Vita Sackville-West on her seventeenth-century ancestor, Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset. Such labelling indicates the problems which still bedevil any study of Civil War royalism. Brian Wormald's Clarendon brilliantly revealed that the men who joined Charles I in 1642 represented a broad range of opinion. Above all, he made us aware of a coherent group of moderate (‘constitutional’) royalists who throughout sought accommodation. There was a palpable difference of strategy between these people, who favoured royal concessions in order to prevent further military initiatives, and others who favoured military initiatives in order to prevent further royal concessions. Within these two basic matrices, there were further subtle inflections of attitude between individuals and within the same individual over time. But many such inflections remain murky. Wormald's lead was never followed through. Charles's supporters have consistently received less attention than those who remained with parliament; and among the royalists, moderates have attracted fewer studies than ‘cavaliers’ and ‘swordsmen’. There is thus an urgent need to clarify different varieties of royalism and especially to bring the constitutional royalists into sharper focus. However, before we can assess their wider aims and impact, we must first identify them; and here the inappropriate labels bestowed on so many of Charles's supporters create real problems. Anne Sumner has recently ‘de-mythologized’ John Digby, first earl of Bristol, revealing him as more complex and less intemperate than the ‘hawk’ of legend.

During Queen Anne's reign it was thought noteworthy that, in an age otherwise disfigured by party rancour, the charity school movement had won general acclaim. ‘No colourable Objection has been made against it’, declared the high churchman Andrew Snape in 1711, ‘nor indeed can it meet with Opposition from any, but those who are unwilling that the Empire of the Devil should be weaken'd, that Vice and Immorality should lose any Ground, and who are the declar'd Enemies of God and Goodness’. Charity schools were viewed as a force for unity in a politically divided society. Writing to Robert Harley in August 1710, John Hooke expressed his hope that Harley would lead a non-party ‘Coalition of Honest Men’, and noted universal praise for the charity schools as a sign of optimism for the future. At the 1709 anniversary service of the London charity schools, Samuel Bradford, a whig divine, bemoaned divisions in the body politic, but happily remarked that ‘The design which we are here pursuing has a natural tendency to unite the serious and pious of different persuasions amongst us’ Bradford's joy, though, was tempered with a warning. Just as there was ‘nothing more likely to unite us, than the zealous Prosecution of such a design’, so there was ‘nothing could so effectually defeat our endeavours in this case, as the espousing or promoting any particular Party or Faction’. The Reverend Lord Willoughby de Broke also feared that the charity schools would be dragged into the arena of party conflict. The charity would flourish, he commented in 1712, “if our political Discords do not withhold the Mercy of God from prospering this good work”.

The historical verdict on the General Court of the East India Company has often been an unfavourable one. The Court, the ultimate sovereign body within the company, has invariably been described in terms similar to those which used to be applied to the eighteenth-century house of commons: it has been seen as a corrupt, disorderly, and disreputable political institution. Macaulay set the general tone in 1840 when he painted a typically vivid picture of proceedings at the General Court in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘The meetings’, he wrote, ‘were large, stormy, even riotous, the debates indecently virulent. All the turbulence of a Westminster election, all the trickery and corruption of a Grampound election, disgraced the proceedings of this assembly on questions of the most solemn importance’. This unflattering and somewhat impressionistic sketch has occasionally received uncritical acceptance from modern-day historians, and indeed it may be endorsed by contemporary observations of particular events at the Court. In 1767, for example, a first-time visitor to the Court room at India House in Leadenhall Street was appalled by what he saw, and he came away with the impression that this was ‘the most riotous assembly I ever saw’. And yet, on numerous other occasions commentators were full of praise for the good order and high standards of oratory at the Court. This has prompted two of the leading modern authorities on the history of the company in Britain to comment favourably on the quality of debate at India House during the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.

Between 1900 and 1918 the Labour party changed from being a new organization operating on the fringes of the Liberal party, to being the largest British opposition party. This change has attracted a great deal of historical attention. The analysis of electoral results in general, and municipal election results in particular, rightly plays a major part in the conflicting explanations of why this realignment took place. Negatively, this paper seeks to establish that many of the methods of examining electoral material common in the literature are in fact inadequate. It is also suggested, more positively, that despite problems with the way results are currently used, even a modestly elaborated treatment of municipal election results can reveal significant information about the origins and location of Labour's support. Accurate ‘quantification’ cannot of itself explain the rise of Labour, or the pattern of electoral politics more generally. It can, however, be an important component of broader attempts at establishing why political changes took place both in Edwardian Britain and in the still under-researched period between 1918 and 1931.

Recent archival research has elucidated the German purpose in sending Joel Brand to Istanbul in May 1944 to negotiate the exchange of Hungarian jews for ‘goods’. Himmler's aim was to enlist the zionist leadership in an effort to detach the western allies from Russia and obtain a separate peace. It is also known now that the allies were initially willing to ‘keep the door open’ by negotiation, but suddenly broke off contacts in July. And we know too how Moshe Shertok – the jewish agency's ‘foreign secretary’ – was tricked by a British promise that Brand would be allowed after meeting him in Aleppo to return to Budapest.

Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fáil lost power in 1948 after sixteen years in office and the five remaining parties in the legislature formed a coalition government. Fine Gael was back in power. The last time the party had held office was in 1932. But they were now only the larger party in an inter-party government which included the Labour party, a splinter group called National Labour (which reunited with the parent party in 1950), Clann na Talmhan, and Clann na Poblachta. This was one of the most ideologically divided governments in the history of the state. It very soon became faction-ridden. Only one thing united this variegated political grouping – the unanimous wish to keep Eamon de Valera and his party in opposition.