For well over a decade studies in local history have occupied a significant position in the historiography of early modern England. In particular, the study of the ‘county community’ as the most significant English political and governmental unit and as the primary sphere of social and affectional loyalties for the greater number of those Englishmen constituting the political nation has become securely established. Within this wide and fruitful field for continuing research the theme of the ‘points of contact’ or reciprocal communication between the court and the county, Westminster and the provinces, which Sir Geoffrey Elton raised not so long ago and which Kevin Sharpe more recently attempted to apply to the problems of government in early Stuart England, suggests that investigations of the gentry of a particular county might illustrate how this interchange between the centre and the localities functioned. For such a study to prove fruitful, however, one prerequisite would appear to be necessary: a member of a prominent county family, perhaps its head, who also holds a major office of state or position at court. Such a man was Sir James Croft whose eminent position in Herefordshire was founded on the contacts he made and the patronage he attracted in the last years of Henry VIII's reign. Although this position was threatened in the years of his disgrace during Queen Mary's reign, it gathered strength again in the 1560s, and reached its apogee during the following two decades. Between 1570 and his death in 1590, he served at court as comptroller of the household.

It has been the standard wisdom of historians that whereas the rebel Dutch continued to trade with Spain and the Spanish possessions throughout the Armada war, the English did not. As the letter-writer John Chamberlain resentfully complained, ‘We for their sake and defence entering into the war, and being barred from all commerce and intercourse of merchandise, they in the meantime thrust us out of all traffic to our utter undoing’. The evidence assembled here suggests instead that English trafficking with the enemy was much greater than has been assumed, although it probably never reached the huge proportions of the Dutch effort. Moreover the substantial volume of illicit trade should point to a re-consideration of some important Elizabethan attitudes to Anglo-Spanish relations both before and during the war, and hence also more generally to religious attitudes.

Although the existence of materials relating to Hobbes's Elements of law and De cive in Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 126 has been known to scholars for some time, the first notice of these in print came as recently as 1987, in an article by Dr J. C. Hayward. The aim of this communication is to provide a full description and analysis of one of these items – the notes and extracts from the Elements – in the hope that this will shed some light on the earlier stages of the relationship between Clarendon and Hobbes.

A spectre is still haunting historians of nineteenth-century France, the spectre of the bourgeois revolution of 1830, surviving despite the exorcism of revisionists. It is a spector that distorts our image of the liberal opposition to Charles X and of the victors after the July Days. Restoration prefects, moved from department to department with increasing rapidity in Charles X's reign, were content to categorize critics of the Polignac government as bourgeois. In the July Monarchy socialists vilified the elite as an established bourgeoise who robbed the real revolutionaries, the artisans, of their rights.3 Early socialists, including Marx, defined bourgeois broadly, to embrace landowners, but later marxists, writing when France was less of an agrarian state, labelled the bourgeoisie of 1830 as a business and industrial elite. The most recent generation of revisionist historians has shown, by empirical and detailed investigations, that the development of industry and accompanying social change occurred over several centuries and that revolutions, in particular, 1789, were mainly political events and more likely to retard than to facilitate the evolution of bourgeois capitalism. Thus revisionist historians of nineteenth-century France refer to ‘notables’ and stress the numerical dominance of landowners rather than businessmen in the elite of both the Restoration and the July Monarchy.

The First World War saw the collapse of the old order in the Eastern Mediterranean with the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, an event which threatened to create a dangerous power vacuum. Great Britain for the pastcentury had attempted to prevent just such a crisis by supporting the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman state. Britain had a number of crucial strategic concerns in the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular the Suez Canal and the Straits. The former was the more critical interest and Britain was determined to keep this essential link to its Indian empire firmly under its own control. As to the Straits Britain, which was concerned about over-extending its strategic capabilities, was content to see this critical waterway dominated by a friendly state. The question inevitably arose therefore as to what would replace the Ottoman empire. One alternative was Greece, a possibility which became increasingly attractive with the emergence of the supposedly pro-British Eleftherios Venizelos as the Greek leader in early 1917.

Historians have not expended much energy in tracing the fortunes of the National Liberal party. Though the party enjoyed a theoretically independent existence for nearly forty years, there is general agreement that it is best seen as a mere adjunct of Conservatism. Writers whose sympathies lie with the mainstream Liberal party have been particularly dismissive. Roy Douglas notes that as early as the autumn of 1933 the Liberal Nationals ‘had become Conservatives for all practical purposes’. In similar terms, Sir Dingle Foot concludes that they ‘became the obedient servants of their Tory masters. In return they received their quota of offices and honours.’ Yet while the policies of National Liberalism became increasingly indistinguishable from those of their Conservative allies, many who bore this label clung tenaciously to it and proved most reluctant to give up their independent identity and ‘the grand old name of Liberal.’ The fortunes of the post-war party, and in particular the role played by its elder statesman, Lord Simon, are not without interest for the student of the modern British political system.