A problem of crucial importance confronted the British labour movement in the 1920s. The working class - those who earned their livelihood by selling their labour power, as well as their dependents - constituted a majority of the population. To the left it seemed manifest that their interests lay in ending a social system which exploited them and putting socialism in its place. Yet during the decade only a minority of British voters committed themselves to socialism, even at the minimal level of voting for the Labour party. As Philip Snowden lamented, ‘the very people for whom [the socialist] works and sacrifices are often indifferent and seldom show any gratitude’. Why did the British working class lack class consciousness?

‘I wish there was no such thing as Local Government’, wrote Lord Salisbury,1 exasperated by the difficulties of securing a measure his whole Cabinet could accept. Gladstone's second administration had already encountered difficulties in considering the question, and had not proceeded to legislation. The subject thus passed to the Conservatives. And, though Local Government was not considered an issue of the first importance, the fact that they were to some extent dependent upon the support, and therefore influenced by the wishes, of the Radical Unionists made for prolonged negotiations before County Councils were finally established in 1888. These negotiations and difficulties are principally interesting for the light they shed on the politics of the time. But, since they revolved around technicalities, they cannot be understood without some exposition of the possible courses open to a legislator.

On 16 April 1697 King William III of England gave his Royal Assent to a Bill just passed by his Whiggish Parliament, thereby making illegal a custom of very long standing in the history of English law and convention. During the Middle Ages the practice of imprisonment for debt had come into being through statutory enactments and through judicial procedure; parallel to it had grown the use of so-called ‘privileged places’, refuges to which delinquent debtors could flee and evade arrest for debt. While imprisonment for debt persisted as a legal process in England until the middle of the nineteenth century, sanctuary for debtors was legally abolished by this Act of 1697. That this Act was passed by a Whig-dominated Parliament is not without significance, for a substantial element in the Whig Party was the mercantile interest, the group most likely to suffer damage by the flight of debtors to these places of refuge.

This article explores the official motivation behind the authorization in 1960 of research into the activities of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War by M. R. D. Foot, leading to the publication of SOE in France in 1966. The work has traditionally been viewed as the official response to critical investigative works on SOE published during the 1950s, combined with the vocal campaign of Dame Irene Ward, who made several calls in the House of Commons for an official account of SOE to be published. Material now available at the Public Record Office reveals that these were not the sole considerations in official minds, nor the most significant, concerning the possibility of publishing such a work. The foreign office was particularly concerned that Britain's contribution to wartime resistance in Europe, exemplified by SOE, was being overshadowed by both soviet propoganda, emphasizing the communist contribution to resistance, and the publicity being given to SOE's American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The ‘campaign’ of Dame Irene Ward, supported by the negative slant given to SOE in the books of Jean Overton Fuller and Elizabeth Nicholas, unknowingly gave support to a frame of mind that was already in existence in favour of an unofficial account of SOE activity, albeit for different reasons.

The importance of the English wool trade in the middle ages is so well recognised that it is difficult to remember that its history is still largely unwritten. This is particularly true of the century before the advent of the Tudor dynasty to the throne. The careful researches of Professor Tout have thrown some light upon the origins of the Staple system in Edward II's reign and those of the late Professor Unwin and his seminar upon the wool trade in the reign of Edward III, but in this, as in most other branches of economic history, the period of the Lancastrian and Yorkist dynasties is an almost unworked field. Ample materials for an investigation of the subject exist, but many of the most important are still hidden in English and foreign archives and much laborious spade work remains to be done before the whole story can be told. That story really involves two distinct problems, which for convenience's sake can be separated—first the institutional history of the Staple and its financial and other relations with the government, and secondly the history of the wool trade, that is to say the technical and financial organisation of the trade, the persons engaged in it, their relations with wool growers at home and wool buyers abroad, and the dimensions of the trade year by year, as reflected in the customs accounts. This article is an attempt to sketch the second of these subjects only, and that for a very limited period. The reign of Edward IV has been chosen because it was a period of considerable commercial activity and because there happens to exist a particularly important collection of material relating to the wool trade at this time.

That Magdalene College should commemorate the centenary of a celebrated son is generous, in two ways. First, because modern England owes a felt debt to Newman, whether it is to Cardinal Newman or only Mr Newman; and since the quarrel between Kingsley and Newman still reverberates out of the Victorian age like the quarrel between Wilberforce and Huxley, anyone who feels any kind of debt to Newman is bound to have less than the highest natural sympathy for Kingsley. The second reason is that Kingsley's attitude to his own college was at one time so tense with contempt, and diis contempt expressed publicly, and read in all the middle-class homes of England, that the contemporary fellows of the college might be pardoned for being tepid when in i860 he came back to Cambridge as a don.

Henry VIII's first two wives experienced multiple pregnancies culminating in late-term miscarriage, stillbirth, or neonatal mortality. After his fortieth birthday, the king's mental and physical health underwent rapid deterioration. In this article, we argue that both his reproductive troubles and his midlife pathologies can be explained if Henry VIII were positive for the Kell blood group. A Kell negative woman who has multiple pregnancies with a Kell positive male will suffer repeated miscarriages and death of Kell positive foetuses and term infants that occur subsequent to the first Kell positive pregnancy. This pattern is consistent with the pregnancies of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. Additionally, Henry VIII may have suffered from McLeod syndrome, a genetic disorder of the Kell blood group system, which is a condition that causes physical and mental impairment consistent with his ailments.

Elizabeth made the decision that the English Church should again be Protestant, but the particular form of Protestantism to be adopted by the Church was not entirely in the power of the Queen, or even the Bishops to decide. A result of the dissolution of the monasteries and the sale of a large part of monastic lands by the Crown was that a greatly increased amount of patronage became vested in lay hands. The Church's theological inclination could be determined by the type of men presented by lay patrons to livings throughout the length and breadth of the country. One particular group amongst the Elizabethan nobility, the Earls of Leicester, Warwick, Huntingdon and Bedford, exercised a very remarkable influence upon the emergent Church of England. This study of the patronage of one member of the group, the third Earl of Huntingdon, illustrates how militant Protestantism could be injected into the Church.

In its issue of 18 November 1870, the Liberal Daily News drew the attention of its readers to a remarkable recent change in the attitude of the British public towards the affairs of Europe.

In 1855 Sir Francis Baring described the Whigs as ‘a body of men…[who] when the people are roused stand between the constitution and revolution and go with the people, but not to extremities’. The Great Reform Bill and Russell's further franchise proposals from 1852 to 1866 were characteristic attempts to conciliate ‘the people’ by extending timely reforms which would preserve the balance of the British constitution. The Whigs had learned the moral of the story of the Sibylline books and accepted its relevance to the process of constitutional reform. Gladstone's Irish Home Rule bill signalled the passing of their moderating influence in the councils of liberalism. However, during the following six years they influenced the Tory government's response to the demands of the newly emerged Indian National Congress. From 1886 Lord Dufferin, the Whig viceroy, pressed for concessions that would ‘take the wind out of the sails’ of the Congress, and from 1889 his successor, Lord Lansdowne, pursued a similar approach. The Tory Councils Act of 1892 was no large constitutional advance. However, it embodied the principle of representation and the germ of the idea of election. That it went so far is attributable to the exertions of the Whig peers, at Westminster no less than in India. The Unionist Lord Northbrook, son of Sir Francis Baring and a former viceroy, proposed a crucial amendment to the Councils bill, and it was carried with the authoritative support of the earl of Kimberley, thrice Gladstone's secretary of state for India and one whom Morley recalled as ‘at the top of the Whigs that I have known’.

In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) pressed Catholicism and the Enlightenment to the limits of their tolerance. A Catholic priest, he fled the censure of his Scottish superiors and settled in England, where he became a spokesman for the Catholic laity in their controversies with the hierarchy, and mingled in radical Protestant circles among the ‘Rational Dissenters’. In three domains, he appalled his contemporaries. First, Geddes prepared a new version of the Bible, which threatened to undermine the integrity of revelation, and offered mythopoeic accounts of the Old Testament that influenced Blake and Coleridge. Second, he embraced ‘ecclesiastical democracy’, denouncing papal and episcopal authority and proclaiming British Catholics to be ‘Protesting Catholic Dissenters’. Third, he applauded French republicanism, and adhered to the Revolution long after Edmund Burke had rendered such enthusiasm hazardous. Geddes was an extreme exponent of the Catholic Enlightenment, yet equally he was representative of several characteristic strands of eighteenth-century Catholicism, which would be obliterated in the ultramontane revanche of the following century.

Britain's most important American colonies did not rebel in 1776. Thirteen provinces did declare their independence; but no fewer than nineteen colonies in the western hemisphere remained loyal to the mother country. Massachusetts and Virginia may have led the American revolution, but they had never been the leading colonies of the British empire. From the imperial standpoint, the significance of any of the thirteen provinces which rebelled was pale in comparison with that of Jamaica or Barbados. In the century before 1763 the recalcitrance of these two colonies had been more notorious than that of any mainland province and had actually inspired many of the imperial policies cited as long-term grievances by North American patriots in 1774. Real Whig ideology, which some historians have seen as the key to understanding the American revolution, was equally understood by Caribbean elites who, like the continental, had often proved extremely sensitive on questions of constitutional principle. Attacks of ‘frenzied rhetoric’ broke out in Jamaica in 1766 and Barbados in 1776. But these had nothing whatsoever to do with the Stamp Act or events in North America.

Between 1917 and 1919 the United States made its first, spectacular intrusion into European power politics. For President Wilson, entry into the First World War was a chance not only to eliminate an immediate threat to American interests but also to transform international relations. The time had come to weld the industrialized countries into a community of interest, based on a shared loyalty to representative government and the market economy, expressed by membership of a League of Nations, and in which economic and territorial causes of tension would have been removed. But hardly had the German obstacle to this programme been overcome before, at the peace conference of 1919, Wilson ran up against almost equally determined obstruction from his former allies. This article examines one source of that antagonism, in the latent conflict before the armistice between American war aims and those of France. It argues that French policy was moulded by a tension between the Paris leaders' own desires for the settlement with Germany and their need to preserve a system of alliances deemed essential for French security in the future as well as for the war itself. By 1917 French governments were already confronted with dilemmas which were to harass them for the succeeding twenty years.

In the January 1916 issue of the Nineteenth Century the Reverend Robert H. Murray contributed the first of two articles on Irish insurrectionary movements during the wars with France at the end of the eighteenth century. He prefaced his text with some homilies directed at the British government of his ow n time:

During the early months of the present War the prospects of the invasion of these islands by sea as well as by air were discussed and prepared for by naval and military authorities. As the struggle developed month by month there has been less discussion of such contingencies. The magnificent work of our Fleet has lulled us into a complete sense of security. We do not foresee an attack upon the East Coast of England: we have almost forgotten our fears with regard to the West Coast of Ireland.

From 1670 there were sustained attempts to use excommunication as a tool to influence parliamentary elections. Excommunicants could not qualify for membership of municipal corporations under the Test and Corporation Acts. Towards the end of Charles II's reign, as fear of protestant dissent grew, excommunication was, however, used to deny voters the right to exercise their franchise. There was a concerted attempt, encouraged by the king, to ensure the election of a compliant tory parliament through the use of excommunication in elections in borough seats. The attempt, reliant on bishops and spiritual courts, represented the high water mark of the ‘confessional state’. Of questionable legality, the exclusion of excommunicants from the right to vote was short-lived. The accession of James II, and his Catholicizing policies, created new alliances between Anglicans and dissenters and eroded the willingness of bishops to use excommunication as an electoral instrument. In 1689, the Toleration Act removed the principal cause of the persecution of dissent. The use of excommunication, nevertheless, represented an important attempt to unite the church and state for electoral reasons.

The historical circumstances which surround the publication of Burke's third and to that date most important pamphlet, the Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, are familiar to every historian of George III's reign. The first decade of the young King's reign was marked (or marred) by a progressive growth in political instability. Despite the advantages enjoyed by George at his accession—the military success of his Government, the political unity of the nation, the absence of a Prince of Wales and the insignificance of the Pretender as a source of opposition—the early promise of the reign, so often commented upon by contemporaries, was not fulfilled. By 1770, and for reasons which have been a great occasion of dispute, an apparendy stable political order had collapsed. After the disintegration of the war coalition, the King was unable to form a stable administration from the fragmentary groups that remained: by the end of the decade five new ministries had tottered to a rapid and precipitate downfall. Nor did die situation out-of-doors appear any more healthy than in Parliament. The organs of dissent—pamphlets, newspapers and prints—had grown in number and scurrility to a level not sustained since the opposition to Walpole, while the presence of deeper fissures could be seen in the eighty-four riots that occurred in England and America during the years 1765–70.

This article sheds new light on the opening of Japan in the late nineteenth century focusing on the legalization of overseas travel and the introduction of passports. It argues that the Tokugawa shogunate introduced passports as a belated endorsement of the increasingly common practice of undercover border-crossing as it feared losing the political grip. Once the new regulation was in place, most travellers went to China or Korea as petty merchants or low-skill labourers, in part recruited by Western merchants and consuls. The foreign ministry, fearing that unrestricted emigration of labourers and mercenaries might harm the country's international reputation and political stability, limited the number of passports to distribute to the treaty ports. Japan's passport system thus focused more on regulating the overseas travel than promoting it, in contrast to the positive light in which the opening of Japan is commonly portrayed. The government largely succeeded in preventing the unwanted emigration, but never fully controlled the process because of the less vigilant port officials and the ambiguity on some of the borders' exact location. Overall, the investigation into the first two decades of the Japanese passport travellers leads to a more complex understanding of modern Japan's opening of borders.

Over ten years have passed since Michael Howard offered what he himself called a controversial thesis about British defence policy before the Second World War. This was that ‘the Empire brought Britain no strength in her dealings with Germany. Yet British strength had nevertheless to be dissipated in the Empire's defence.’ By 1937 the needs of home defence against air attack and of imperial defence seemed so overwhelming toBritish policy-makers that the cabinet decided that no expeditionary force could be spared to help maintain the European balance of power. Howard stressed that he was offering only a ‘very rough preliminary sketch’, which was ‘probably distorted and certainly incomplete’, in view of the limited range of documents which he had had time to consult. In particular, what was missing from his thesis was any attempt to give weights to the relative importance of home and imperial defence problems as explanations for lack of preparation to commit land forces to help allies on the European continent.