The phrase in the title is Charles I's. Writing from Newcastle to Henry Jermyn, John Culpepper and John Ashburnham in September 1646, he voiced his ‘unexpressable greefe andastonishment’ at the advice on the church which he had received from them during the course of his negotiations with the parliamentary commissioners. For they had assured Charles that, if he was no doubt‘ obliged’ by his conscience ‘to doe all’ that was in his ‘power to support and maintain that function of Bishops’, then he had already discharged that obligation to the full, as ‘all the world can witness’. Conscience, in this sense, had no further claims on him, nor could it be more strictly interpreted:

if by conscience is intended to assert that Episcopacy is jure divino exclusive, wherby no Protestant (or rather Christian) Church can be acknowledged for such without a Bishop, we must therin crave leave wholly to differ. And if we be in an errour, we are in good company; ther not being (as we have cause to believe) 6 persons of the Protestant Religion of the other opinion. Thus much we can add, that at the treaty of Uxbridge none of your Divines then present (though much provoked thereunto) would maintain that (we might say uncharitable) opinion, no not privatly amongst your commissioners. Nether doeth it follow that in this, or any the most riged, sence you are obliged to perish in company with Bishops meerly out of pitty (and certainly you have nothing els left to assist them with) or that monarchy ought to fall, because Episcopacy cannot stand.

In the eighteenth century, parish officers used the laws of settlement to regulate the immigration of the poor to their parishes. Their regulation went well beyond ridding their parishes of indigent immigrants. Parish officers monitored the immigration of the non-indigent poor; they insured that their parishes acquired the documents which guaranteed that a poor immigrant would not become the responsibility of the parish to which he had immigrated; and they even removed non-indigent immigrants from their parishes, using their parishes' funds to pay for sending these immigrants back to the parishes which were legally responsible for their welfare.1 To the modern observer, such regulation of migration from one parish to another may seem odd, so odd that some historians have assumed that this regulatory activity did not occur.2 Obviously, then, the parishes' regulation of immigration was part of a world now lost. Regulation of immigration by parish officers disappeared in 1795, when parliament abolished the legal foundations for this practice.3 In detective stories, discovery of the circumstances and implications of a disappearance reveals the structure of the world in which it occurred. So may it be with the regulation of immigration.

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.