Spain's concern with the eastern shores of North America during the earlier part of the sixteenth century had been a peripheral one. Exploration under official and private auspices, both along the coasts and into the interior, had yielded a rich harvest of information, but, down to 1561, projected and attempted settlements and missionary enterprises alike had failed to lead to the establishment of any permanent foothold in Florida or on the coast further north. Spain was nevertheless determined, then and later, to deny the North American lands to any foreign power. But if the preservation of her monopoly rights underlay Spain's resistance to foreign intervention, her occupation of Florida from 1565 onwards and her continued concern to eliminate attempted foreign settlements there and further north in the later sixteenth century was governed by more specific and practical considerations.

It is now three years since Wilhelm Levison, one of the last of the great Monumenta editors, died at Durham. Among the tasks he left unfinished were two of major importance to those whose concern is with Frankish studies. The first, a much-needed edition of the Lex Salica, he seems to have brought no nearer completion than had his predecessor, Bruno Krusch, or any other of the long line of Monumenta scholars who broke their hearts in the attempt to unravel it. The second, the completion of the new Monumenta edition of the Historia Francorum of Gregory of Tours, to supersede that of Arndt and Krusch, was a good deal further advanced. In fact, the text itself had already appeared in print under the name of Bruno Krusch alone, although it was an open secret that a great part of the burden of editing had fallen on Levison's shoulders. What remained—and still remains—to be published is the critical introduction, w*here Levison is under-stood to have developed views on the manuscript tradition that owed less to Krusch than to Krusch's own master, Wilhelm Arndt. While this introduction remains unpublished it is hazardous for others to proceed very far with work based on the text of the Historia Francorum. My own intention here is to do no more than to present an interim report on some of the ways in which historians have been using Gregory in the twenty years since the publication of Dill's and Dalton's books; for they were the last English scholars to whom Frankish studies seemed important for themselves. My debt to them is great.

The relations between Peel and his party form a familiar theme, and even in this centenary year of his death there seems little to be gained from a restatement of the problem, or at least from a restatement in the old polemical terms. Yet in raking over the ashes of that controversy one must always be struck by the paradox inherent in Peel's position. If Peel destroyed his party, he destroyed his own handiwork. The man that twice ‘betrayed’ his followers ranks in British political history as the creator of the first modern parliamentary party. The contrast may be stated in the words of M. Halévy: ‘the statesman who ten years before had accomplished such an outstanding work of party organization by a most intelligible reaction had come to execrate the very notion of party politics’. Clearly if we accept the sharp contrast we must also accept the revulsion of feeling to which Halévy alludes. But another line of approach might be to inquire whether the Peel of the thirties was different in any essential aspect from the Peel of the forties. If the contrasting elements in Peel's career have been emphasized at the expense of the elements of continuity, the task is not so much to explain as to explode the paradox.

The ideal of the regular canons originated in the fumbling, sporadic response of public opinion in the Western Church to that programme of a complete common life for clerical communities to which the Lateran Councils of 1059 and 1063 had given oecumenical recognition. It had at that time taken root only in central Italy and the extreme south of France. Thereafter it spread rapidly in most of southern and north-eastern France, though in Normandy there was no house of regular canons until c. 1119 and none in Brittany till 1130. The order flourished in the Rheims area from an early date, and it is here, in the seventies of the eleventh century, that we find the first traces of the Rule of St. Augustine being adopted by regular canons. Yet it was long before regular canons uniformly served this Rule, and in the second and third decades of the following century writers as far apart as Liége and Ravenna would speak of it very cavalierly.

For a detailed account of the activity known as the Rye House Plot the evidence available is inadequate, and the aura of mystery which surrounded the plot at its discovery on 12 June 1683 has never been wholly dispelled since. Its importance, however, lies less in the details of what it actually was than in what Charles II and his government asserted it to be, and in the use to which they put it to destroy the influence of the Whigs. It was through popular reaction to this use of it that the plot exerted the influence it did upon the revolution of 1688.

I Must start by saying that everything in this paper must be subject to correction from two quarters. Mr. Norman Gash has written but not yet published a book entitled Politics in the age of Peel, which will be a study of the representative system in the twenty years after the Reform Bill, and which will explain to us very much that we need to understand. Secondly, all generalizations about elections are open to correction, indeed are normally in urgent need of correction, by those historians who are prepared to make a more or less intensive study of local conditions in some district. Failure to realize the significance of local conditions vitiates the value of some of the conclusions in that otherwise useful book, Mr. Seymour's Electoral Reform in England and Wales, but it has vitiated other books of more general reference than Mr. Seymour's. In fact we have all been content to describe far too much of the history of the nineteenth century in the terms of the play of a few principal actors posturing before a back-cloth painted with conventional figures, the landlord, the manufacturer, the artisan and worst of all a mass of undifferentiated ciphers without faces which we are pleased to call the middle class. The local historian, and only the local historian, can tear this cloth aside. What he will reveal will not always be a decorous picture; the artist best suited to portray it is obviously Hogarth more often than seems appropriate for the background to such highly respectable figures as Lord John Russell, Sir Robert Peel, John Bright and William Ewart Gladstone.

George III's opinions on politics and the constitution have usually been contrasted with those of some people called ‘the whigs’. The contrast and even the terminology are no mere invention of historians. Quite early in the reign, politicians were already reviving the terms ‘whig’ and ‘tory’, and using them no longer, as in 1760, to denote certain groups of men who called themselves whigs and tories, but to indicate differences of opinion between people hitherto called whigs, about the constitutional rights of the Crown and their proper exercise. “Whigs called other whigs by the name of tories, and ‘pure’ whiggism was increasingly identified with a kind of anti-monarchism which may or may not have been a whig principle in earlier times but was not often expressed openly in 1760. This identification had proceeded pretty far by 1780, the date of Dunning's famous resolution; and two years later, when George III made Shelburne his prime minister without consulting the cabinet, Fitzpatrick thought it natural to say, ‘If this is suffered, there is an end of whig principles.’

Nearly ten years ago I ventured to lay before you some speculations upon the origin of impeachment, and to suggest that the classical view of its nature was not a sure guide to its historical origins. In its developed form it could be reasonably described as a trial by the lords of a person whom the commons had indicted (or nearly so) of high crimes and misdemeanours. Thus linked up with the age-old criminal procedure of the common law, the parliamentary impeachment could cast a decent veil of legality over the political realities which too often disgraced it, and could pose before the world in the reassuring robes of justice.