The Turkey Company, one of the many commercial ventures started during the reign of Elizabeth, was first organised in order to break the monopoly in Eastern commodities which had fallen into the hands of the Venetians, to the great detriment of English trade. The early history of the Turkey Company has already been submitted to detailed investigation, and need not be recapitulated here. The object of the present paper is to throw some light upon an aspect of the subject which has hitherto received little attention, namely, the part played in the foundation of the Company by William Harborne, our first Ambassador to the Porte, but for whose courage and perseverance the whole enterprise must have fallen to the ground. His services to the Turkey Company may be compared to those of Sir Thomas Roe to the East India Company; but whereas the journals and diaries of the latter have been worthily edited, those of Harborne remain almost entirely unknown. Harborne, during his six years at Constantinople, kept up a close correspondence with Lord Burleigh, Sir Francis Walsingham and Mr. Secretary Davison. He was a voluminous but not an elegant letter-writer: his style is so cumbrous and involved that at times it is difficult to understand exactly what he means, and one is tempted to wish that he had written in Latin.

Eighteen years ago F. W. Maitland edited for the Selden Society the first volume of the Year Books of Edward II. In his introduction to that volume, moved by a pardonable enthusiasm, he wrote-perhaps not altogether advisedly— “It will some day seem a wonderful thing that men once thought that they could write the history of mediaeval England without using the Year Books.”. Since then that sentence has been frequently repeated, although it is to be feared that for the most part historians have turned a deaf ear to its warning: and lately Mr. W. C. Bolland, who has himself edited several volumes of Year Books for the same Society, has reiterated Maitland's plea and, going further, has drawn a damaging comparison between the Year Books and the Plea Rolls. The Year Books, we are told, “are the living body, acting and speaking and thinking and wrangling and changing its mind on the pressure of the moment”: while the Plea Rolls present “the skeleton, the dry bones of the bare facts.” It is true that Mr. Bolland is careful to explain that the Year Book and the Roll each contain matter which is absent from the other, and that for historical purposes neither is complete without the other: but there is no doubt that the general impression left by Mr. Bolland's lectures is that the Year Books are of high historical value, that they contain, in his own words, “innumerable matters of interest, legal, historical, constitutional and social, about which the record is entirely silent.”

The “Mutiny” was the summary of the rise of the British in India, and, as the cry of the Sepoys at Meerut was “Delhi, Delhi,” it is in Delhi that the key to a political theory must be sought. The scope of this paper is limited, therefore, to the light thrown upon the subject by “the proceedings of the trial of the King of Delhi.” Its object is to examine afresh this document as a test for a theory of the relations between the East India Company and the Mughal Empire, and consequently of the nature of the rise of the British in India.

The Whig interpretations of the English Constitution based on the doctrine of executive responsibility to Parliament, as established by the Revolution of 1688 and Locke's vindication of that event, were crystallised and defined by eighteenth-century political practice, eulogised and expounded by Montesquieu and Blackstone, and asserted and elaborated by Junius and Burke. But they were subjected to criticism at least two decades before the Revolution in France stimulated political speculation and inspired demands for reform. Long before the outburst of reforming enthusiasm expressed in the activities of the Revolution Society, the London Corresponding Society and the Society of Friends of the People, which was kindled by the opening episodes of the French Revolution, there was in England a well-established movement for parliamentary reform.

Historical Research is very much in the air just now. Public opinion is at last awake to the fact, which is elementary to us, that only by knowledge of the way in which national problems have been solved in the past can the problems of the present and the future be successfully dealt with. Historical Research opens the gateways to the longforgotten centuries. In regard to the more modern times embraced by the last few centuries, its special object is to ascertain with precision the details of those problems, political and international, the reasons which led to their solution, satisfactory or otherwise. I propose to glance at this aspect of it only. When one realises what those national problems are, that they have varied little since we began to understand what the sea means to us, it stands to reason that research should be treated as a national business; but, after our traditional manner, the period about which we ought to know so much, but know so little, is left to the individual. And war impressions speedily fade: witness the interest which Parliament takes in this matter, and the knowledge it displays of the work involved, as shown by the opposition to the grant of a modest salary to the Historian attached for purposes of research to the Foreign Office. The general criticism was that no such officer was required, that everybody knew where the facts of any event in history were to be found, and that when wanted any Foreign Office clerk could be turned on to the job of finding them!

An enquiry into the office of Deputy-Lieutenant, as created by the Tudors, might be said to belong, strictly speaking, to military history. But it belongs also to the history of local administration, for not only was the organisation of county levies an integral part of local government, but that type of military rule which prevailed under the Tudors touched the common life of the country at many points, and those matters with which the Lieutenant and his Deputies could be called upon to deal in the service of the Crown demanded at least as much administrative skill as aptitude in the military arts.

Among the many unexplored fields in the history of the Outer Empire, the British settlements on the West African coast, until the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, have been the most neglected. The main course of English relations with that coast from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century has been told in an admirable survey by Sir Charles Lucas, and several histories of the Gold Coast exist. None of these sources, however, have provided more than an outline sketch of the English settlements in West Africa, and the method of government and organisation by which they were maintained in the eighteenth century has not been examined. The most recent history of the Gold Coast, published in 1910 by Mr. Walton Claridge, is mainly occupied with nineteenth-century history, and no attempt is made by him to give anything but a cursory description of government in the previous century. Many other surveys of European progress in Africa have been written, but in all of them the treatment of the eighteenth century is slight. It is easy to account for this neglect. The story of the coast is bound up with the most discreditable of undertakings that mark the expansion of the Empire—the negro slave [trade—and Lecky's brief account of the English relations with West Africa would not encourage research into a subject so humiliating to national pride.