Parliament governs by means of acts of parliament. When the number of acts of parliament increases over a period we may speak of a rise of parliamentary government, and when it decreases, of a decline. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts parliamentary government declined. Taking into account the length of their reigns, Elizabeth and James I passed fewer acts than either Henry VIII, Edward VI or Mary. Charles I passed fewer again. Under Charles II, however, the number increased, and under William III it was much higher than ever before. Thus:

This article recovers the rationale behind the project to found a ‘new’ British history undertaken by J. G. A. Pocock in the early 1970s, and contrasts this with the approach adopted in the subsequent historiography. The article argues that British history as conceived by Pocock was intended to transcend the parochialism of national history whilst also rehabilitating the writing of imperial history without succumbing to the temptations of metropolitan whiggism. Pocock's perspective was constructed against the backdrop of a British withdrawal from empire and led him to a neo-Seeleyan interest in the dynamics of imperial expansion and retrenchment. While this process is best understood through the comparative study of empires, any such undertaking raises complex questions about the ultimate subject of historical inquiry and the nature of historical explanation. In addressing these questions, this article distinguishes the ambition to write the history of a polity from the aim of writing histories of ‘party’ as originally formulated by the historians of the Scottish enlightenment whose work has been among Pocock's abiding subjects of investigation.

‘The National Bank of Turkey was founded in 1909 with British Government encouragement and support to further British economic enterprise in the Ottoman Empire’ so we are told in all die standard and respectable works on the subject. This is correct in form but incorrect in substance, for one cannot accept the implications it carries with it, in some cases explicitly stated. These are that, in the first place, the Foreign Office was instrumental in actually starting the Bank, in the second place, that the Bank succeeded very far in its objects, and in the third place, that it ever received much Foreign Office support in what it sought to do.

Seventeenth-century English men and women, caught in the upheaval of the Civil War, sought to understand what it was to be English and sought to grasp England's proper role in the world. One of the ways in which they did this was through their encounters with other people. The Irish had a long history of interaction with the English, but in the middle of the seventeenth century their role in defining Englishness became acute. Late Tudor and early Jacobean commentaries on Ireland had stressed the superiority of English culture while acknowledging some virtues of Ireland and its people that would make it amenable to beneficial transformation by the English. In the middle of the century, occasioned by the events of the 1641 uprising, this ameliorative view of the Irish gave way to the view that English and Irish were incompatible. Earlier studies have emphasized the role of religion in the discordant relationship between the two peoples in the seventeenth century. This essay maintains that the shift in attitude had as much to do with ethnicity as it did with religion and considers the central role of John Temple and his treatise The Irish rebellion in changing English attitudes on both a national and local level. The study suggests that Temple's view became the dominant one for more than 200 years because of the demographic changes within the Irish community in London and puritan concerns about a godly community that occurred at the time Temple set forth his ideas.

From the standpoint of the late Victorian and Edwardian governing classes, the most disturbing feature of the ‘social problem’ was the breakdown of British industrial relations. The long ideological and political truce observed by organized labour more or less since the 18405 had ended. A new and more militant trade unionism had emerged which condemned the consensus policy of the craft unions and challenged both the prerogatives of management and the conventional criteria of wage determination. Not only did it endanger social stability, it was also regarded in government circles as a major obstacle to British economic growth. Industrial unrest would, it was feared, disrupt production, intensify resistance to technical innovation, and weaken Britain's cost competitiveness in world markets. In the establishment press, in the parliamentary reports, and in the political memoirs and diaries of the period, one therefore finds a growing concern to secure industrial peace; a concern reflected in the growth of state intervention in industrial relations.

Traditionally puritanism has been treated as a religious phenomenon that only impinged on the world of that ‘secular’ politics to a limited extent and mainly in relation to church reform. Such an approach, however, is to employ a misleadingly narrow definition which ignores the existence of a much more all-embracing puritan political vision traceable from the mid-sixteenth century. First clearly articulated by some of the Marian exiles, this way of thinking interpreted the Bible as a manifesto against tyranny whether in church or state. Under the successive regimes of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, puritans can be found who continued to judge the actions of government by the same biblical criterion, which also helps to explain among other things their prominence in opposing unparliamentary taxation. Puritan ideology itself was transmitted down the generations partly via a complex of family alliances, underpinned by teaching and preaching, and this in turn provided a basis for political organization. Moreover, the undiminished radical potential of puritanism is evident from responses to the assassination of Buckingham in 1628. Given these antecedents the subsequent resort to Civil War appears less surprising than historians often claim.

It is increasingly common in modern literary theory to read that a text's meaning must be elicited from the textual ‘possibilities which are not said’. At this level of generality, the proposition applies equally to the interpretation of non-literary as literary texts. In this paper, I shall endeavour to illustrate the usefulness of this approach by considering the meaning of Locke's argument in Two treatises in terms of things which Locke chose not to say. I shall argue two points. First, I shall suggest that many of the controversies which have arisen in recent years about Locke's meaning have suffered because inadequate attention has been paid to the precise character of a number of silences in Locke's argument. The persistence of an inadequate framework for understanding the character of Englishmen's appeals to an original contract, constitutional law and history in the late seventeenth century will occupy my attention here. Second, I shall suggest that attention to the details of Locke's most significant silences can cast light on current controversies about the intellectual status of Locke's argument. In particular, I shall argue that the current tendency to locate Two treatises within a context of coded, conspiratorial politics is mistaken.

In the history of Renaissance thought and learning jurisprudence seems to be a missing term. Not that the scholarship of civil, canon and customary law is itself lacking, or lagging, but it has not been sufficiently integrated with that of other fields, and even in the modern history of the Renaissance ‘encyclopedia’ it does not hold high priority. In some modern views of the studium, in fact, law seems to stand not only below the trivium and quadrivium but even, since it lacks utility as well as liberality, below the mechanical arts. Petrarch and other humanists would no doubt be pleased at this turnabout; and others may find justice (in a historian's if not a lawyer's sense) at the fall of the profession of law from academic grace. For present purposes, however, we must try to lay aside the prejudice which many of us may feel toward lawyers, modern counterparts of the pedants derided by Petrarch and the ‘mean and mercenary’ pettifoggers denounced by Cicero. It is not the purpose here to plead the cause of Renaissance jurists; but it may be possible, by attending to some of their less celebrated (or lamented) achievements, to do some justice to their place in the history of learning.

Ruth Williams was not a typist. She was apt to be put out when the newspapers called her that. In fact she was a secretary, a confidential clerk, with a firm of Lloyds' underwriters in London. On 30 September 1948, at a registry office in Kensington, she married Seretse Khama, heir to the chieftaincy of the Bangwato in the Bechuanaland Protectorate. No-one knew whether the Bangwato would accept a white consort. British newspapers ran features headed ‘Shall typist be a Queen?’ (Sunday Dispatch, 28 November 1948), and ‘This girl can upset the peace of Africa’ (Sunday Express, 10 July 1949). White opinion in South Africa was aghast: the marriage was condemned as ‘distasteful and disturbing’ (Johannesburg Star, 28 June 1949), as ‘striking at the root of white supremacy’ (Natal Witness, 2 July 1949). Ruth's parents opposed the marriage and did not attend the ceremony. Her father, George Williams, was a retired Indian army officer, working as a commercial traveller. Ruth was born in 1923, and brought up in Blackheath and Lewisham. She attended Eltham High School, took polytechnic classes in cookery, and served for four years in the war as a corporal-driver with the W.A.A.F. Together with her sister Muriel, she was a churchgoer, keenly interested in the African work of the London Missionary Society. They were constant visitors to the colonial students' hostel at Nutford Place in Bayswater. It was at an L.M.S. meeting in 1947 that she met Seretse, a quiet, friendly, relaxed and thoroughly Anglicized law student of twenty-seven, with an alert mind and honest manner. The sexual attraction between them was apparently strong. But there was also in their decision to marry a challenging element of anti-apartheid zeal. Ruth abhorred the colour bar, and felt she could do at least as much good in Bechuanaland as missionary wives had done.

Parliament's Protestation of May 1641 pledged subscribers to defend the protestant doctrine of the Church of England against all popery and popish innovations, while upholding the honour of the king, the privileges of parliament, and the liberties of the subject. The following twelve months saw contentious debate about the ambiguity of these phrases and the conflicting obligations they entailed. Leaders of the political nation subscribed the Protestation voluntarily in the summer of 1641, emulated in some places by ordinary parishioners. In the more polarized political circumstances of early 1642, parliament ordered the Protestation to be taken nationwide by all men aged eighteen and above. Women, too, occasionally subscribed. This article traces the tendering and reception of the Protestation on both occasions, and examines some of its local consequences. The circulation of the Protestation significantly widened the arena for political and religious involvement in the opening stages of the English revolution.

On 3 August 1914 a short-lived Radical body of intellectuals, the‘Neutrality Committee’, issued a statement to the press calling upon Britain not to depart from a policy of strict neutrality. A similar organization, which went under the title of the British Neutrality League, and supported by an imposing array of Liberals—Lord Welby, the Lord Provost of Glasgow, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, the Bishop of Hereford and C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian—did much the same. It implored the nation not to take part in a Continental war, since no British interest was involved: ‘the violation of Belgian neutrality was insufficient to bring us into war’. Other spokesmen of moderate and left-wing Liberal opinion followed suit, among them a fairsized number of Cambridge scholars. Meetings and demonstrations were held throughout the country to protest against possible British intervention. Organized by the socialists in Trafalgar Square, these were of impressive proportions. In Parliament, too, a small group of dissenting M.P.s withstood the gathering war hysteria and urged the Government to accept the German guarantee of Belgian ‘integrity’, though this might mean a temporary invasion of her frontiers. All in all this last-minute spectacle of opposition to British involvement in the 1914 War has sometimes led to the historical assessment that the Radicals, together with their socialist allies, were men of an insular mind and isolationist in their approach toward European politics.

In a jarring passage toward the conclusion of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes endorsed the abolition of episcopacy and the establishment of an Independent religious settlement within England. Most historians have ignored this feature of Leviathan, or have dismissed it as an off-hand aside of no consequence. Others, more plausibly, have construed it as part of a royalist scheme (encouraged by Queen Henrietta Maria and her supporters) to secure a Stuart Restoration by allying with the English Independents. This article offers an alternative theory. It argues that Hobbes's attentions were probably drawn to Independency by the political machinations of a group of idiosyncratic Catholics gathered around the philosopher-priest, Thomas White (alias Blacklo). In 1649, White and his ‘Blackloist’ followers engaged in secret negotiations with Oliver Cromwell. In exchange for religious toleration for Catholics, the Blackloists promised allegiance to the Commonwealth and conformity to a Congregationalist religious settlement. This article examines Hobbes's close personal links with the leading Blackloists, documents similarities in their reactions to Independency, establishes the strong intellectual influence Leviathan had on Blackloist tracts, and demonstrates that royalists consistently linked Hobbes with the Blackloist treason. The article concludes that the Blackloist plot to betray the Stuart cause, rather than any royalist scheme to strike a deal with the Independents, provides the most compelling contextual explanation for Thomas Hobbes's endorsement of Independency.

While the crucial question of the contribution of the troubles of the 1620s to the eventual dissolution of the old political order in Stuart England remains clouded in debate, with historians like C. Russell questioning the whole concept of escalating parliamentary opposition to the Crown in that decade, we are at least beginning to recognize the pattern of provincial unrest and the growing interaction of national and local agitation at this time. D. Hirst in particular has shown how constituencies were increasingly volatile and vociferous, a development which owed a great deal to the expansion of their electorates. In the boroughs country gentry joined forces with anti-oligarchic groups of citizens to broaden the franchise. Here agitation was strongly influenced by the severe economic and social problems of many county towns during the early seventeenth century.

Few historical doctrines agreed better with the prejudices of what one may call the romantic-liberal school of historians of the last century than the classical theory of Germanic kingship. In early Teutonic society, according to this theory, there were normally no kings, but in each nation there was a royal race from which kings could be chosen by the ‘folk’ if need arose. ‘Kings’, wrote Tacitus, ‘are chosen by reason of their nobility, dukes because of their good qualities’, and it was assumed that such an arrangement, which so judiciously combined a romantic respect for aristocratic traditions with a democratic element of popular selection, still held good in the epoch of the Barbarian Invasions. More sober historians of a later epoch echoed the enthusiasm of earlier scholars. The king, wrote Kern, ‘possessed a certain hereditary reversionary right, or at least a privileged “throne-worthiness” in virtue of his royal descent. But it was the people who summoned him to the throne with the full force of law, in as much as they chose from among the members of the ruling dynasty either the next in title or the fittest. … What distinguished the king from a freely elected official was his hereditary right to the throne; but this was an hereditary right not of any individual ruler, but of a ruling family…All members of the ruling family are royal’. Bury put it even more clearly. ‘A German state might have a king or it might not, but in either case it was virtually a democracy.… Some of them had kings; any of them might at any moment elect a king; but the presence or absence of a king might almost be described as a matter of convenience, it had no decisive constitutional importance…. But the people who had no king required an executive officer of this kind likewise. Well, they had an officer who was called a graf…. The graf was elected by the assembly, and the assembly might elect anyone they liked. The king was likewise elected by the assembly, but in his case their choice was limited to a particular family, a royal family. In other words, the kingship was hereditary, and the grafship was not. But this hereditary character of the kingship was of a limited kind. When a king died, the office did not devolve on any particular kinsman of his; the sovran people might elect any member of the family they chose; they might refuse to elect any successor at all.

The essay examines the forced resignation of the duke of York as commander-in-chief of the British army in 1809 as a case study in the complexities of patriotism during the Napoleonic war. The recent work of Linda Colley and others has emphasized the conservative use of wartime patriotism as a means of defending the established political order in general and royalty in particular. But the parliamentary and outdoor pressure that prompted the duke to step down in response to suspicions that he had permitted his mistress to trqffick in army commissions indicates that staunch supporters as well as critics of the status quo did not hesitate to invoke patriotism as a means of criticizing royalty when it was thought to have neglected its duty to set a good moral example to the nation. There is no question that a large majority of the duke's critics felt that royalty was integral to what they believed was Britain's uniquely privileged position in the world. But the York affair suggests that a great many ‘patriotic’ Britons felt that the royal family had to be protected from its own occasional indiscretions as well as from the Napoleonic peril.