As the devil never leaves unbelieving heretics in repose, they conspired in such cities as Paris, Rouen, Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse and other large cities to surprise the catholic Christians and put them all to the sword. The king was apprised of this near the end of the year 1572, whereupon, considering well such a damnable enterprise, he sent orders to all the cities to inquire as to the truth of this endeavour…. When its truth was discovered, he ordered, so that the cost of the executions for which he otherwise would have had to pay might be avoided, that…[the huguenots] be put to death in all of the cities of France where they could be caught. [Explanation of the Saint Bartholomew's massacre provided by an anonymous catholic chronicler, 1581.]

And first, it is necessary that we should agree what we mean by an absolute Monarch, which is indeed a point rather controverted, than clearly decided by any Author, that I have yet met withal. [Thomas Goddard, Plato's Demon, 1684.]

In his celebrated work England under the Stuarts George Macaulay Trevelyan dismissed in a single sentence the question of the position adopted by the bulk of the English rural population during the Civil War: ‘The tenant-farmer was in no position to avow any political or religious faith but that of his landlord.’ Given this assumption it was logical that Trevelyan and his successors should concern themselves with the problems and opinions of landlords and other, more independent, men and leave the doings of the peasantry to students of agrarian and social history. And so they have, never seriously questioning the proposition that the aristocracy's sympathy for the Crown would be reflected in the attitudes and behaviour of their tenants. Indeed, the king himself had felt confident of the peasants' support, and an assortment of facts and myths have been marshalled post facto to persuade us that his confidence was justified. For example, since peasants were assumed to have been rather simple-minded and very conservative men, it was deduced that they ought to have sided with their monarch. The Great Chain of Being, the accepted basis of heavenly and earthly society, placed kings between man and the angels, surely a height bound to inspire awe in a plain man of the soil. According to some historians, Charles I had been a veritable champion of the poor with his vigorous campaign to enforce the poor laws and his commissions for the prevention of enclosure. His humbler subjects must have been grateful for such paternalism. In any case, as Trevelyan pointed out, the stark reality of their dependent position would have forced tenants to adhere to the party chosen by their landlords, and most landlords who committed themselves to a party joined the king's.

In 1949 Sir Herbert Butterfield showed, for one important episode, the necessity of treating England and Ireland as a single political world and of explaining public events in London and Dublin concurrently. Yet most modern scholarship has persisted in examining the two nations in isolation. Ireland is typically relegated, like Scotland, to a separate chapter in the manner of the Oxford history of England; and despite studies of Anglo-Irish constitutional disputes in the light of analogous debates over the American Revolution, the close texture of the reciprocal influence of English and Irish politics in the mid eighteenth century has still received almost no attention from historians. One, indeed, has positively asserted that ‘From the end of Queen Anne's reign until the 1770s Ireland was almost outside the range of British politics’. In reality the connexion was both strong and of several kinds. Many English politicians had an opportunity to learn through personal involvement in Ireland lessons which they were later to find applicable at home. The fourth dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, Richard Rigby, Lord George Sackville, Henry Seymour Conway, the duke of Newcastle and Henry Fox were all involved both in the Irish crisis of the 1750s and in the English ministerial controversies of the 1760s. The English ministry was kept fully informed about Irish politics through both formal and informal channels. Even statesmen not directly concerned had links which encouraged them to keep in touch with events in Dublin. Fox, in Ireland in the summer of 1750 visiting his brother-in-law the earl of Kildare, sent Henry Pelham perceptive accounts of the crisis to date in which he argued for the necessity of eventual legislative union between the two countries; Charles Townshend was aware of Irish problems at the same time as he was preparing, for Newcastle, his ‘Remarks upon the Plan for a General Concert’ of the American colonies.

The Crimean war has been the victim of much conceptualization. For modern historians, drawn to the phenomenon of a European conflict conveniently sited in the middle of a century of comparative peace, much can be made to hang on it. Whether it is an aberration, or the expression of suppressed feelings, or indeed the beginning of a current that is to grow stronger until 1914, diplomats, soldiers, politicians and economists have taken it as a dividing line. It is simultaneously the continuance of the Peninsular tradition in warfare and an array of technological novelties tempting the variously applied title, ‘the first modern war’. But while its impact on domestic politics and European diplomacy has been scrutinized, and while Captain Nolan has failed to convey his breathless order to the Light Brigade correctly on innumerable occasions, the bridge between the two, between – at its most banal – politics and tactics, has not been so closely examined.

Historians have spilt much ink in explaining the diplomatic machinations which led to war in 1914, but rather less ink in accounting for the bitterness which the war aroused. The answer to that question probably lies outside the realm of diplomatic documents. For Britain at least, a tiny part of the answer can be found in a myth which became increasingly virulent in the decade or so before the war: the myth of the evil and ubiquitous German spy.

After almost forty years of discussion and analysis, British policy at Munich in 1938 remains as controversial a subject as ever. But despite the fact that many thorough and important studies have been written, the focus of the controversy has not shifted very substantially. Much emphasis is still placed upon the ‘men of Munich’ and the question of whether they were guilty men who betrayed Czechoslovakia or reasonable and astute statesmen who sought to preserve the peace of Europe. And, in consequence, both their defenders and their critics have invested a great deal of effort in scrutinizing their contemporary writings to see whether their intentions in September 1938 were laudable or contemptible. However, it is by no means certain that the fundamental causes of governmental behaviour during a crisis are revealed in their clearest perspective by a concentration upon the contemporary utterances of policy-makers. For, by the time such a situation has been reached, the available options are normally strictly limited so that the task of the ‘decision-maker’ is often to provide a rationalization, both for himself and posterity, for a course of action which has been all but predetermined by earlier decisions. This article seeks to demonstrate that the Munich crisis was of such a type: that it represented a continuity in Britain's Central European policy and that the behaviour of the ‘men of Munich’ can only be judged in the context of this continuity. It argues, in fact, that the British adopted a policy of ‘passive pragmatism’ in defence of their world position throughout the inter-war period and that it was this which accounted both for their inaction between 1933 and 1937 and the Munich policy in 1938.