Some years ago my attention was drawn by Professors Paul Kristeller and William Nelson of Columbia University to two manuscripts – one in the Bibliothèque Publique de Besançon and the other in the Escorial – of a text that appeared to be the last work of Stephen Gardiner, a leading conservative churchman, diplomat and publicist in the Henrician period, and, from 1553 until his death in 1555, Mary Tudor's chancellor. The text is in Italian, and is titled Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli inglesi et normanni in Britannia – ‘ A discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to Britain’. The translator, George Rainsford, worked from an English original now lost, and appended to the Gardiner text his own Ritratto d'Ingliterra or ‘Description of England’; he dedicated the composite volume to Philip II, among whose books the Escorial manuscript had been. The dedication is dated 16 March 1556, some four months after Gardiner's death. Both the Gardiner text and the Rainsford appendix have now been published.

Thomas Norton is one of Sir John Neale's parliamentary heroes. Neale demonstrates his importance in the ‘puritan choir’, that organized opposition party which was so active in the parliaments of 1563–66 and 1571. He and his colleagues are variously described as ‘troublesome’, ‘rebellious’, ‘hostile’, ‘nuisances’, ‘zealots’, ‘agitators’and ‘hotheads’, and Norton himself is depicted as ‘one of the most conspicuous of our ‘‘choir’’’. The result is a generally accepted portrait of a puritan agitator, tactician, and parliamentary organizer.

On 10 May 1791 the British house of commons was divided on an unsuccessful attempt to move the repeal of the Test Act as it applied to Scotland. Since then this has been one of the more neglected of the many religious issues which were deeply embedded in late eighteenth-century British politics. It might be described as the ‘Scottish sequel’ to the movement in 1787–90 for the general repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Yet it had its own distinctive features and reverberations which were by no means confined to Scotland. It is proposed here to examine the background, nature, progress and outcome of the Scottish application, to consider how it differed from the events of 1787–90, to investigate the role of its sponsor and leading parliamentary advocate Sir Gilbert Elliot and to look closely at the voting on the subject of the Scottish M.P.s. The aim will then be to consider the episode against the background of contemporary parliamentary politics.

The so-called ‘decade of reform’ witnessed far-reaching changes not only in Britain's domestic affairs but also in the colonial sphere. This applied particularly to the sugar colonies. Until the early 1830s the economy and society of those colonies had rested upon two main pillars – slave labour and a protected market for their produce in the United Kingdom. Yet within a few years the first of these pillars was completely destroyed, the second was already beginning to crumble, and the old ruling classes in the sugar colonies were in a state of frustration, rapidly despairing of the possibility of adapting themselves to the new situation.

Important landmarks, especially on the well-trodden ground of British history, sometimes appear to be so precisely delineated that they leave little room for re-interpretation. Yet if familiar episodes are looked at from perspectives which pose new questions and call for different evidence the result may well be unexpectedly illuminating. The making of the Second Reform Act is a good example. Though the subject of close scholarly investigation in terms of British parliamentary politics, it has not hitherto been viewed as only one of many closely linked domestic and foreign pressures which bore upon the British polity between 1866 and 1868 and which together exercised a decisive influence upon it. Reform, public order, economic recession, integration of the classes, concern about defence, and the challenge to Britain's international standing, were all components of the same crisis, and whether by chance or ingenuity it was the same power groups which had to handle them within the confines of time and circumstance.

Historians have become increasingly concerned to describe and to explain the role of capital and capitalists in three related episodes of Transvaal history: the Jameson Raid at the end of 1895, tne outbreak of the South African War in 1899, and the Reconstruction period after that war. This article reviews recent analyses, and seeks a new synthesis of the published evidence.

At the close of World War I two schools of thought about the future conduct of international relations emerged into plain view. On the one hand, the traditionalists presumed that the principles and practices of pre-1914 diplomacy could and should be sustained. This implied a routine of continual competition among the sovereign nation states, the anarchy of which was mitigated only by the collective fear of hegemony by one state (the mechanism of the balance of power) and by a sense of belonging to a common civilization (the old Concert of Europe). Tacitly accepted as the final arbiter of vital questions was the instrument of war. On the other hand, the First World War had provided ample grounds for a swingeing critique of Realpolitik when practised in an age of mass armies and technological warfare.

In Gordon J. Schochet's new book on Patriarchalism in political thought (New York, 1975) there is one thirty-year-old assumption that he should have challenged. Our estimate of Filmer's place in political thought and the relation of his ideas to his contemporaries’ depends to some extent on the date at which he is presumed to have written Patriarcha, and Schochet has unquestioningly accepted Peter Laslett's dating of the work in the late 1630s, or at the very latest before the outbreak of civil war in 1642. The New Cambridge bibliography of English literature, without any explanation, gives the date as 1635. It was not always so. Edmund Bohun, Filmer's first editor, thought Patriarcha was written in 1642, and James Tyrell, one of his early detractors, began his attack with the assumption that Patriarcha was the culmination of Filmer's work and contained his ‘most mature thoughts’. The implausibility of a date in the thirties seems recently to have escaped everyone's notice, probably because we are all immensely indebted to Laslett not only for finding the best text of Patriarcha at East Sutton Park in 1939 but for editing it with a scholarly introduction ten years later.

John Foster's book, Class struggle and the industrial revolution, with its central focus upon ‘the development and decline of a revolutionary class consciousness’ in Oldham in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, has aroused considerable controversy amongst historians. Indeed most recently Foster's picture of intense, often violent class conflict has been directly challenged by Dr Gadian. He has contended that ‘class collaboration, rather than class war’ was the key to the radical success in the town. On the basis of comparative figures on the size of the workforce in the factories of the various Lancashire towns, he has criticized Foster's emphasis upon the concentration of economic power in the hands of a relatively small number of capitalist families. Moreover he has even claimed that ‘the prevalence of small-scale industry in Oldham did much to enable masters and men to ‘harmonize and unite in some common remedy’, as was possible in Birmingham’.