Early in 1644, the more active and radical men in the House of Commons decided that if the war against the king was to achieve anything, firm action was needed to defeat him. Parliament needed a centralized executive to run the war effort efficiently. When Scotland became Parliament's ally, this executive had to be a joint body, representing the Scottish Estates as well as both English Houses of Parliament. The result was the Committee of both Kingdoms, planned earlier by the Commons' moderate leader John Pym, who had begun to see, towards the end of 1643, that peace negotiations were getting nowhere and that Parliament would have to defeat the king in order to gain the concessions for which it had begun the war.1

The major argument of those who view the Statute of Proclamations as a tyrannical measure seems to be that the government planned to use it to replace Parliamentary legislation with legislation by decree. Unfortunately this supposition has not been tested by a study of the actual use of proclamations in the reign of Henry VIII. The continuation of a three-centuries-old controversy over the meaning and intent of this enigmatic statute indicates that further efforts to unravel the mystery by concentrating on the wording of the statute and the circumstances surrounding its passage would prove unrewarding unless new evidence were to be uncovered. This dilemma suggests that a new approach is necessary. If the Statute of Proclamations is to be understood in its proper context, the total role of proclamations in Tudor legislation and administration must be investigated, and their relationship to other types of legislation during the entire Tudor period must be studied.

‘Thanks to thy sublime merits the times in which we live may be freely compared with the greatest days of Antiquity.’ So, in 1490, wrote Politian to the king of Portugal, casting a hopeful eye over something like a century of Portuguese imperial endeavour.1 Sixty years later, in a significantly different style, a Spanish chronicler surveying his own country's even more spectacular achievements saw them as ‘the greatest event since the making of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of him who created it’. Since then the idiom may have changed, but not the conviction, and at some time or other almost everything from the unshackling of man's mind from the bonds of medieval superstition to the rise of a capitalist economy has been attributed to the discoveries. Recently we have been invited to see Lisbon as the second Byzantium, and from the Sorbonne there has come the grand apocalyptic message of the birth of ‘un humanisme technique’ manifested in a new and seminal ‘sens du réel, sens du chiffre et de la précision’.

The death of the marquis of Santa Cruz (9 February 1588) left the Spanish Armada leaderless. On 14 February, for reasons that have never seemed remotely satisfactory, Philip II named Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, 7th duke of Medina Sidonia, to take his place. Medina Sidonia has been universally regarded rather like a rabbit pulled mystifyingly out of a hat by the king to the amazement of rabbit, spectators, and historians alike. Attempts to explain the appointment have been half-hearted and, until some recent revaluations of the duke's administrative abilities, have concentrated overwhelmingly on his character and social position. Portrayed as an amiable poltroon, loyal, unassuming, and characterless, utterly devoid of military experience but not too proud to be guided entirely by his expert advisers, he was just the man to do what he was told without questioning the instructions of the real admiral of the Armada in the Escorial, or cavilling at his subordination to the supreme commander of the invasion forces, the duke of Parma—issues which had already embittered relations between the king and the marquis of Santa Cruz. At the same time, personal jealousies among Santa Cruz's leading lieutenants, the refusal of the military to accept seamen on equal terms, and the presence in the Armada of a large number of titled and class-conscious gentlemen-adventurers all meant that the new commander had to be an outsider, a landsman, and a nobleman so illustrious that nobody need be ashamed to obey him or take precedence behind him. As the premier duke in Spain, Medina Sidonia's social qualifications were impeccable.1 Some historians have pointed to the duke's religious devoutness as a further recommendation, others have wondered whether his promotion were not a sentimental memento of an extinct romance between Philip and the duke's mother-in-law.

In a whimsical scene of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine enter the banquet hall only to have an invisible Faustus snatch away their dinners and, in a truly spectacular exit, scatter the banquet hall with fireworks.1 The Cardinal of Lorraine has been surrounded by fireworks for four hundred years. This is an effort to give him some peace at last.

The concern here is a symposium of quite another sort, the Colloquy of Poissy. Poissy, the last great Colloquy of the Reformation, was an attempt at religious reconciliation of Calvinist and Catholic within the framework of the Gallican Church.

It is increasingly becoming a commonplace to assert that non-political activities engaged in during childhood play determinative roles in shaping individuals' attitudes toward and perceptions of the political order. A large part of this early ‘political socialization’, as it is now called, takes place within the family, which, in the words of one commentator, ‘incubates the political man’, whether or not there is a conscious attempt to inculcate political beliefs. As T. D. Weldon remarked, ‘Basic political creeds may not be actually imbibed … with mother's milk: but children are none the less indoctrinated in practically every other way.’ This socialization plus later experiences (including reading, conversations, and direct encounters with government) will help to implant notions of political legitimacy; that is, the grounds on which a political authority is held to be entitled to rule. Legitimacy and the consequent public acceptance of government are among the very foundations upon which politics rests. In the words of David Easton,

If a government…is to be capable of performing its tasks, the member of the [particular political] system must be prepared to support the particular norms and structures that organize the way in which all political activities are performed. That is, they must be willing to support the 'constitutional order' or regime. Hence, we are identifying the fundamental rules of the game, as they are often described, regulating participation in political life and the particular way of organizing political power in a given society.

Why was Thomas Hobbes never made a Fellow of the Royal Society? The question has been asked and answered in nearly all the intellectual biographies and other such studies of Hobbes, as well as in several of the histories of the early Royal Society itself. Since I wish to discuss the same question again, it is worth pausing first of all to neutralize two possible doubts about the value of this exercise.

Several British statesmen have also been historians: Clarendon, Russell, Rosebery, Churchill—and Charles James Fox, although he produced only one volume. His History of the early part of the Reign of James II is a fragment of what might have been a much larger work; it was published posthumously, with a preface by his nephew Lord Holland, in 1808. Although it was given a mixed reception by the critics, it was regarded for several decades as something of a classic. It was translated into French, German, and Dutch; and was republished several times in England during the nineteenth century (most recently as a threepenny paperback in Cassell's National Library in 1888).

One of the best-known remarks of the nineteenth century, and probably the one most often repeated by contemporary politicians, was the Duke of Wellington's challenge to the Whig reformers in 1831, ‘How is the King's government to be carried on?’ In their difficulties in the late 1830s the Whigs found the question more pertinent than they had allowed during the debates on the Reform Bill.

In most accounts of the rural uprisings of 1857 the moneylender, whether described as ‘sleek mahajan’ or ‘impassive bania’, is cast as the villain of the piece. It is he who is seen as the principal beneficiary of the landed revolution that occurred in the first half-century of British rule in the North-Western Provinces and gave the non-agricultural classes of the towns a mounting share in the control of land. And his ascendancy is attributed directly to the institutional changes effected by British rule, among the most important of which were the transformation of the immediate revenuecollecting right {malguzari) into a transferable private property; the heavy, inelastic cash assessments; and above all, the forced sale of land rights for arrears of revenue or in satisfaction of debt. ‘The public sale of land’, says Professor Chaudhuri, ‘not merely uprooted the ordinary people from their smallholdings but also destroyed the gentry of the country, and both the orders being victims of British civil law were united in the revolutionary epoch of 1857–8 in a common effort to recover what they had lost.’.

On 23 November 1801 Henry Addington addressed the House of Commons on the financial affairs of the nation. The prime minister, in the course of his remarks, alluded briefly to the government's intention of selling certain Crown properties in the West Indies. The measure was planned, he explained, as a means of reducing arrears charged upon the Civil List.1 Although Addington hoped to effect the sales without parliamentary opposition, the question soon became entangled in the meshes of political intrigue. With remarkable cunning the young Pittite, George Canning, sought to use the issue as a means of driving William Pitt into opposition to Addington's government and of creating a new opposition party with Pitt as its leader.

Until 1793, the judicial policy of the Company's Government in Bengal was guided only by expediency and tradition. The tradition was that of the Moghul government which entrusted the management of civil justice to the Executive and those in charge of collection of revenue; 1 and the expediency—that of discharging the responsibilities of the Diwani with as little spending from the profits as possible. This is clearly visible in Warren Hastings's administrative arrangements of 1772 under which the civil judiciary in the mofussil was consigned to the District Collectors of revenue. With few interruptions marked by Hastings's administrative experiments,2 the practice of keeping the revenue and judicial functions united continued for the following twenty years. In 1790, when for the first time the Company took over the administration of criminal justice, the District Magistracy was also vested with the Collector. He thus became the Judge, Magistrate and Collector, all in one. This ‵single officers′ plan for the Districts had been advocated by Sir John Shore as being in conformity with the tradition with the Indians looking up to a single despotic authority for the redress of all their grievances,3 and had found favour with the Directors4 for the economy involved.

If anyone could be claimed the father of the school for the scientific study of Indian defence policy it would undoubtedly be Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor. With the re-opening of the Central Asian Question in the early 1860s, it became MacGregor's mission in life completely to recast the Indian defence structure and it counter-insurrectionary role to enable it to undertake large-scale offensive operations against a major European military power. Almost single-handedly, he began to create the machinery within the Indian Army establishment—the special departments, professional institutes, journals and literature—to stimulate a greater awareness of the special and peculiar nature of Indian defence problems that this new role involved, and to encourage an iconoclastic re-examination of prevailing defence assumptions. From MacGregor's groundwork there was logically bound to arise a sense of Indian Army professionalism separate and distinct from that of Great Britain, and the beginnings of the belief that obligations of national defence are inseparable from nationhood. It was MacGregor who first appreciated on the basis of systematic and scientific study that India constituted a vast manpower reservoir, greater than that of Ireland and Egypt together, upon which Britain relied for the prosecution of her imperial, military and foreign policies in the East; that the North-West Frontier presented the only strategic boundary that Britain had to defend; and that the geo-strategic and demographic facts of her existence had made India potentially a great military power bound to adopt a ‵Continental′ military policy and defence structure in many respects parallel to those of the major European military powers.

Of the making of books on the women's rights movement there is no end, but detailed study of the ways in which the role of women changed in the second half of the nineteenth century has by comparison hardly begun. Yet it is clearly such investigations alone which can show how far the conventional stress upon feminism has been well judged. The religious activities of nineteenth-century British society are admittedly very far from being the area in which the greatest changes occurred in this connexion. Nevertheless for two reasons their investigation seems well worth while. In the first place, when ‘the woman question’ first attracted widespread attention among the British middle classes, the churches were still the great arbiters of public attitudes towards social issues, and the social influence of religious beliefs, practices and institutions was undoubtedly far more extensive than, for example, that of John Stuart Mill or the National Society for Women's Suffrage.

The Benthamites or Utilitarians are often held to have been at least partly responsible for the Reform Act of 1832. To historians who make this attribution, Bentham's own writings have not been a help. They are generally too abstract and difficult to have been popular; and where (as in the Parliamentary Reform Catechism) they have an avowed practical purpose, they are at once too detailed and too extreme to be easily related to practical legislation. James Mill, on the other hand, claimed to be disciple of Bentham, held administrative office, and wrote short tracts which are known to have circulated among a whole generation of young liberals in the 1820s.2

In June 1890 Lord Salisbury negotiated an agreement with Germany ceding Heligoland in return for the renunciation of German claims to Uganda, the cession of the German protectorate over the East African coast north of Witu, and the recognition of a British protectorate over Zanzibar. Although France was a party to the Joint Declaration of 1862 which guaranteed the independence of Zanzibar, Salisbury did not consider himself bound to consult her about the proposed change in the island's status. More surprisingly, he offered no assurance that French rights in Zanzibar would continue to be respected. When the French protested, Salisbury apologized for this oversight and entered into negotiations with their ambassador, W. H. Waddington. On 5 August a new agreement was signed whereby France recognized the British protectorate over Zanzibar in exchange for the recognition of her own protectorate over Madagascar and of her sphere of influence ‘south of her Mediterranean Possessions, up to a line from Say on the Niger, to Barruwa on Lake Tchad, drawn in such a manner as to comprise in the sphere of action of the [Royal] Niger Company all that fairly belongs to the Kingdom of Sokoto’.

There can be few fields in modern English history in which the historian is so frustrated by lack of evidence as in the study of elections between the introduction of the secret ballot and the coming of the opinion polls. For threequarters of a century after the Ballot Act was passed there is no precise quantitative evidence relating to movements of opinion or the voting behaviour of different groups within the electorate. We cannot even hope for conclusive evidence of what, in general terms, the determinants of voting behaviour were in this period; how to balance the importance of the national party competition and of local pressures; of the ‘image’ and the leadership of the parties and their programmes; of class loyalties and religious loyalties; of electoral persuasion and the fluctuations of a still unmanaged economy. These questions are strictly unanswerable, for there are no pollbooks from which we can deduce the opinions of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century electors, and they are beyond the reach of questionnaires. The only statistics we possess are the bare figures for votes cast for each party in contested elections, and the number of registered electors in each constituency (from which we can calculate the percentage of voters who went to the poll).

Cardinal Manning in old age wanted his successor to follow his lead into the temperance movement: ‘I pray God that my successor will humbly and with his whole heart go into the midst of the people as I have tried to do’, he wrote in 1890, ‘and will give to the League of the Cross a warm and encouraging countenance.’ He also wanted his successor to join the prohibitionist United Kingdom Alliance as ‘the only real power outside of Parliament to hold the Drink Trade in check’. When Herbert Vaughan attended a dinner of Manchester publicans who advocated winter-gardens and light beers as the agents of temperance, Manning was furious and excluded him from the list of his executors. In many statements from the 1870s onwards Manning expressed his passionate enthusiasm for the temperance movement. His temperance speeches show that he took great trouble to keep his arguments up to date, and that he read widely in temperance literature. Here, then, was no passing enthusiasm, but a cause to which Manning devoted his life after 1868, and for which he laboured through literature as heavy as Dr F. R. Lees' Alliance Prize Essay and the report of the 1853–54 Select Committee on Public-Houses. He travelled about the country on temperance tours, gave evidence before a parliamentary committee on the drink question, and braved much hostility from within the Catholic world by creating the League of the Cross, an association of Catholic abstainers.

The storm over Fritz Fischer's study of German aims in the First World War seems to be abating at last. Even in Germany, where the process of readjustment has understandably been painful, few historians would now dispute Fischer's conclusions on the war aims themselves, though the secondary argument on Bethmann Hollweg's role in their formulation continues. More surprising still is the growing acceptance of Fischer's position on the origins of the war. If his opponents were at first concerned to deny that German policy was at the root of the July crisis, their present purpose is only to deny that an annexationist programme existed before the outbreak of war. If his opponents were at first concerned to deny that German policy was at the root of the July crisis, their present purpose is only to deny that an annexationist programme existed before the outbreak of war. Most German historians now accept either that Imperial Germany was taking a ‘calculated risk’ in supporting Austria over Serbia or that Germany was anxious to launch a ‘preventive’ attack on Russia and France before especially the former Power grew too strong.

The concept of imperialism which Hobson, Lenin and the combined force of the international socialist movement forged into an idée fixe of the twentieth century was roughly handled by Western scholars long before 1945. But since then the attack has grown more precise and its character has altered. Among the first of the post-war historians (writing in English) to attempt the dethronement of imperialism as the demi-urge of the period between 1870 and 1914 was Richard Koebner. He determined on a semantic approach and put the term's linguistic history to rigorous scrutiny. On the philosophical assumption that a term's meaning is to be defined by its actual use and provenance in the political discourse in which it arose, he found that the modern concept of economic imperialism sprang out of a limited, local controversy over the nature of the Boer War. He concluded that it had been illicitly mated with other forms of militarism and economic expansion to spawn a hybrid, mythical monster that had been allowed to sprawl its length over more than half a century of world history.1