Historiography of the years immediately preceding the English civil war has tended to conceive of two disparate entities in politics, Westminster and the localities. There are in practice two distinct kinds of history, reflecting diis division, which connect only on rare occasions. The latest major work on the period can, despite its title, limit itself almost entirely to the confines of Westminster and the court, while the student is faintly aware of volumes of local works which contain scarcely a hint of what passes outside the town wall or beyond the county boundary. Parliament was indeed an aggressively self-conscious and independent body, and the county or borough was frequently particularist and introverted, but this did not preclude all contact between the two. Dr Pearl has demonstrated how vulnerable parliament was to the influence of London, and vice versa, and there have recently been several local studies which illustrate the close relationship between the county and the centre. But by and large, Clarendon's assessment of the importance of the Buckinghamshire petition against the attempt on the Five Members, and the obvious prominence accorded by Commons leaders of both sides to petitioning, has not been sufficiently appreciated. Parliament was deeply concerned about what might be termed ‘public opinion’: events in the localities, and the reactions to parliament's policies.

Robert John Wilmot Horton became associated with colonial affairs in an official capacity at a time when the Colonial Office was in the throes of a reorganization. He did not bring any previous experience to his new office, and his ability was not highly rated - ‘He had always appeared to me a particularly silly fellow’, Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, was to remark later - but his tenure as the Under-Secretary of State for War and Colonies was not devoid of success. The role he played in the reorganization of the Colonial Office, for instance, was noteworthy. He proved to be an able lieutenant to Earl Badiurst, the Secretary of State. Yet Horton attained only a limited success in his political life. By the year 1828 he was out of office, and by 1830 was out of parliament. Having reached an impasse in his political life, Horton was led to seek a colonial appointment, a decision which was also partly strengthened by his pecuniary embarrassments. He staked a claim to the Governorship of Canada, and later to the Governorship of Madras, but what he was to receive was a less coveted position, the Governorship of Ceylon.

The Afghan war blue books of 1839 have usually been regarded as classic examples of the way official documents can be mutilated by skilful and unscrupulous editing almost to the point of forgery. Sir William Kaye's monumental and authoritative history of the first Afghan war, published in 1851, contains this crushing indictment:

I cannot, indeed, suppress the utterance of my abhorrence of this system of grabling the official correspondece of public men-sending the letters of a statesman or diplomatist into the world mutilated, emasculated-the very pith and substance of them cut is palmed upon the world has not one redeeming feature.

Property and trade must first of all be formed privately, then the flag and protection can come in as well. (Bismarck minute on Krauel to Bismarck, no. 24 of 22/4/1885, in R.Kol.A.2835.)

In 1914 Britain, though hesitantly, decided to enter the war, thus fulfilling her loosely-defined obligations towards the other Entente states. After the outbreak of the war, Britain was just one partner in an alliance whose members had undertaken on 5 September 1914 not to conclude a separate peace and also not even to consider any peace-offer without previous consultations. These mutual assurances were supposed to ensure a victory settlement satisfactory to all the Allies.