The assumption by Henry VIII of an effective supremacy over the English church and the enforcement of the legislation which accompanied it has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet, though the main themes of the story are clear, the obstacles which the central government met in the dioceses of England, and the way in which policy emerged as a response to them, has not been examined so meticulously. The problems confronting the government in 1534 are obvious enough: the bishops, as well as many others, who had been brought up in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, and who had administered the affairs of church or state in the period before the divorce, were left in a state of suspense in 1534. What tangible effect would the royal supremacy have? If it was to bring in a new order, what would that order be? And what part should bishop, priest or layman take in promoting or hindering it? For the bishops who had obtained their sees by papal bull before 1534, the dilemmas posed in the years to come were great. For Fisher of Rochester, the way forward was to the scaffold. Others, like Warham of Canterbury, Sher-burne of Chichester, Nix of Norwich, West of Ely, Blythe of Lichfield and Coventry, died during the crucial period 1533–8, thereby making room for those who had not been bishops before the assumption of the supremacy. But, for a small group of bishops, there was no escaping the problems of comparison which these years brought. Between 1534 and 1538, the translation of the royal supremacy into a practical reality in the dioceses and parishes of England was attempted.

The preservation and the consolidation of international peace was the general aim of Emperor Alexander I of Russia in the first year of his reign. The young autocrat, faced with the novelty of international politics and bent on domestic reform, hoped for good relations with all the powers and tried to avoid any serious entanglement in European affairs. Diplomatic relations with Great Britain, which had been severed by the unstable Emperor Paul, were restored in June 1801, and a treaty of friendship was signed with the French Republic in October of the same year. Alexander expressed his readiness to co-operate with Bonaparte, whom he at first much admired, in arranging a general continental pacification and in settling the indemnities for the German princes dispossessed by France's expansion to the Rhine. The only issue that could have marred Franco-Russian relations at die time was Alexander's concern that full inde- pendence be restored to Piedmont and Naples. Nevertheless, the appointment of V. P. Kochubey, an advocate of a passive foreign policy, as head of the College for Foreign Affairs in October 1801, confirmed Alexander's pacific intentions. Yet widun four years Russia was to find herself at war with France as a leading and zealous promoter of a wide European coalition and the champion of a new European order.

The brief ministerial crisis of June 1844, precipitated by the defeat in the House of Commons of the government's proposals for the temporary adjustment of the duties on imported sugar, and resolved when Sir Robert Peel secured from the House what amounted to a reversal of the decision, has been scrutinized by two historians in recent years. In his earlier work, Dr Stewart cites with approval contemporary observations to the effect that Peel's authority was severely shaken by the affair, and remarks that ‘by 1844 the Tory, nationalist wing of Peel's party was beginning to unite in resistance to the progressive tendency of Peel's government. In 1844 they gave Peel a warning of what they might do.’ His second assessment is more emphatic. He interprets Conservative disaffection on the sugar issue, and on the factory bill three months earlier, as the ‘first challenge to Peel's leadership’, and argues that it revealed that ‘Peel's hold over a large section of his party was at an end, destroyed by his own methods’.

That Magdalene College should commemorate the centenary of a celebrated son is generous, in two ways. First, because modern England owes a felt debt to Newman, whether it is to Cardinal Newman or only Mr Newman; and since the quarrel between Kingsley and Newman still reverberates out of the Victorian age like the quarrel between Wilberforce and Huxley, anyone who feels any kind of debt to Newman is bound to have less than the highest natural sympathy for Kingsley. The second reason is that Kingsley's attitude to his own college was at one time so tense with contempt, and diis contempt expressed publicly, and read in all the middle-class homes of England, that the contemporary fellows of the college might be pardoned for being tepid when in i860 he came back to Cambridge as a don.

In his volume in the Oxford History of England, R. C. K. Ensor gave us the first scholarly and dispassionate account of the reforms which Edward Cardwell made in the British army between 1868 and 1874. Ensor consciously followed Gladstone, who called Cardwell the greatest war secretary since die era of die Napoleonic wars. Ever since Ensor wrote, it has been impossible to do what Fortescue, the army's historian, did when he wrote whole chapters on the army after the Crimean War without once mentioning the name of Cardwell. Among more recent scholars diere has been a good deal of writing around the subject of the Cardwell reforms widiout actually attacking them head-on. We have a brief biography of Cardwell which quotes at some length from his correspondence, and we have a description of the purchase system in the army. There have been studies of a part of the background of the Cardwell era, and of die working-out of the reforms in the army of the 1870s and 1880s. Two recent works have been rather critical of the value of Cardwell's work.

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘… in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers … [which] … saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement…’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’.

‘The National Bank of Turkey was founded in 1909 with British Government encouragement and support to further British economic enterprise in the Ottoman Empire’ so we are told in all die standard and respectable works on the subject. This is correct in form but incorrect in substance, for one cannot accept the implications it carries with it, in some cases explicitly stated. These are that, in the first place, the Foreign Office was instrumental in actually starting the Bank, in the second place, that the Bank succeeded very far in its objects, and in the third place, that it ever received much Foreign Office support in what it sought to do.