In February and March 1539 Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, visited Calais on a commission for examining the town's fortifications. Returning to England, he promised Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, the lord deputy of Calais, who had entertained him during his stay, his goodlordship and a horse with saddle and harness. In exchange, Lisle's wife dispatched from Calais a present of a stole and a linnet, and she also asked the Seymours if her daughter by a previous marriage might be placed in their care. The exchange of gifts derived partly from the amicability struck up during Seymour's visit; but it was also part of an act of reconciliation. In the previous five years or so, the Lisles and Seymour had clashed, bitterly but not violently, in two land disputes. In the first dispute, the ageing, grossly inefficient, heavily indebted, blue-blooded and heirless Lisle was the victim; in the second dispute, it was Lady Lisle's son by her first marriage. In each dispute, Edward Seymour was the aggressor, unmercifully exploiting legal loopholes. In each case, in the first instance, when the matter came before the law, Seymour was thwarted: by an award in Chancery in the first dispute, and by the king's intervention in the Court of Common Pleas in the second; and then, by more devious means, he managed to have his way. The disputes shed light on the personality of Edward Seymour, the future protector Somerset, and also upon the power and influence open to certain subjects within the Tudor system of government.

Recently several works have illuminated the important role played by diplomats in the course of the religious wars of the latter half of the sixteenth century. We propose to shed some additional light on this general subject by studying the often curious activities of some Spanish envoys to France and England with respect to Spanish Protestants who had taken refuge in those lands. Through a careful scrutiny of related but seemingly minor matters we can frequently learn more about major ones.

The modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work ‘incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory’ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography that Hobbes's ‘extraordinary boldness’ set him completely ‘outside the main stream of English political thought’ in his time. The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ‘against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition’, but that the tradition (‘fortunately’) proved too strong for him. Hobbes was ‘the first to attack its fundamental assumptions’, but no one followed his lead. Although he ‘tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions’, he succeeded only in provoking ‘the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles’, a re-assertion, in fact, of ‘the main English political tradition’. And the more Leviathan has become accepted as ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece’ of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as ‘an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity’. Hobbes's system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the ‘intense opposition’ which its ‘boldness and originality’ were to provoke.

In the constitutional evolution of eighteenth-century Britain a major problem was the resolution of the tensions which arose between the executive powers vested in the Crown and the legislative supremacy of Parliament. Although the seventeenth-century conflicts of Crown and Parliament had settled the question of ultimate supremacy in favour of Parliament, eighteenth-century politics, by common consent, were confined to the level where a balance of power could be seen to operate, in which king, Lords, and Commons exercised agreed functions and powers and where the ultimate weapon—parliamentary supremacy—need not be used. The independence of the Crown—however it may have operated in practice—was a cardinal doctrine of the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution. Although this doctrine was usually invoked to support the right of the king to choose his own ministers, it gave an important constitutional role to the Civil List, for by supplying the Crown with a financial provision not subject to parliamentary control the Civil List served the pur-pose of supporting the independence and the ‘influence’ of the Crown. The uncontrolled expenditure of the Civil List, with its large number of attractive places, pensions, and other benefits, was an important part of that ‘influence’ which some considered necessary for the effective exercise of executive power and which others decried as a threat to the independence of Parliament. The disputes and jealousies created by the Civil List developed in the reigns of George I and George II and came to a climax in the reign of George III. The result was an alteration of the constitutional foundation of the Civil List which further weakened the doctrine of the independence of the Crown and which marked an important step in the evolution of parliamentary government.

The English-speaking society of nineteenth-century Colombo, as in other areas in Ceylon gradually acquiring an urban character, was composed of two main units—the European, and the native. Within both were intricate subdivisions, which 'Sampson Brown’ described in a comic sketch of 1842:

Glibb and I have had some rather long chats about the natives and their moral character. They certainly are a most repelling race: there's no making anything of them as yet, and I doubt if we ever shall…A native of one particular caste will not marry into or associate with another and so the whole race of them is split into small factions. This is bad enough say you, but…the white man's caste rages [sic] as widely and deeply as that of the Buddhist…In Ceylon you find the Burgher caste, the Civil caste, the Military caste, and the Mercantile caste, all little worlds distinct from each other, travelling in different orbits. They would not dine with each other, I suppose, if their existence depended on it.

In July 1905 Lord Kitchener, the Indian chief of General Staff, wrote at the krequest of the viceroy a memorandum entitled A note on the Military policy of India, which was in due course sent to England for consideration by the home government. Its plea was for a consistent policy with regard to the North-West Frontier. At the moment, Kitchener complained, this was ‘apt to change with every ministry and almost with every minister, while each incoming Viceroy probably develops a policy of his own’. The main danger facing India was uncompromisingly described as ‘the menacing advance of Russia towards our frontiers’.