Seventy-five years ago the Clarendon press published the first volume of The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Developments, and its third volume came out in 1878. Those of us in Cambridge who have been responsible for the list of books recommended to the attention of the students of medieval constitutional history have of set purpose placed Stubbs’ book in the category of those recommended for ‘study’—a category in which no other secondary history book is to be found. It is our considered view that no student of the early history of our constitution can dispense with reading it, and this article, is an attempt to justify that opinion, whilst indicating, as far as may be, the directions in which the results of seventy years ‘research and reinterpretation have supplemented Stubbs’ knowledge and modified our attitude to his judgements. I would say at once, with all the force at my disposal, that there is no nineteenth-century historian towards whom it is less possible to be condescending without condemning oneself as unfit to study history. As one who loves Maitland this side idolatry, I can only accept Professor Galbraith's opinion that Maitland's learning fell far short of that of Stubbs—as Maitland himself would have been the first to declare. ‘In the augmentation of knowledge’, he said, ‘Dr Stubbs stood supreme. No other Englishman has so completely displayed to the world the whole business of the historian from the winning of the raw material to the narrating and generalising.’

Students of history are liable to assume that the entity ‘England’ has existed at all points in her past in roughly the same way as she exists in their present–not the same England of course, but the same sort of phenomenon, corresponding to a strictly similar social and political reality, apprehended in the same sort of way by contemporaries. When they read statements about any period, they tend to feel confident that the word ‘England’ is one that can be taken for granted, as representing something self-evident or something which can easily be explained in terms of geography and political history.

In none of the critical years 1830, 1848, 1870 and 1940 did the French Second Chamber as a body play an independent part in effecting or hindering a change of regime. But in 1814 there is one of the most striking occurrences in the history of the French legislature. The Conservative Senate takes a lead in bringing about a change of government, while the Lower House, so much more to the fore in later crises, obediently confirms the acts of the Upper. The story, often told as an episode in the fall of the Empire or the beginning of the Restoration, may bear a brief re-examination as an episode also in the history of the French Second Chamber.

At a meeting of the Birmingham Political Union in May 1833, the principal guest, Daniel O'Connell, congratulated his audience on having carried the Reform Bill through to success, for, he said, ‘it was not Grey and Althorp who carried it, but the brave and determined men of Birmingham’. In the heat of the struggle, even some of the whig ministers were willing to admit in the famous words of Russell that ‘it is impossible that the whisper of a faction should prevail against the voice of the nation’. One of them told Thomas Attwood in May 1832 that ‘we owe our situation entirely to you’. Lord Durham maintained that ‘the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution’. Earl Grey himself, after the safe passing of the bill, thanked Attwood for all that he had done ‘to maintain popular support for the measure outside the House of Commons’.

In 1807 William Smyth, tutor of Peterhouse, was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge through the good offices of Lord Henry Petty, later third Marquis of Lansdowne and then still liberal M.P. for the University. Two years later, not long after Smyth had delivered his first course of lectures, there appeared the caricature of him reproduced as a frontispiece to this paper and bearing the same title. It represents him in profile lecturing to a drowsy and yawning audience of undergraduates and elderly bewigged Fellows.