That the mid-seventeenth century in some way marked a turning point in English history now seems generally accepted. It witnessed, Professor Davis tells us, the beginning of a commercial revolution; it saw, Mr Hill has argued, the country converted to a vigorous new style imperialism. These are large questions which cannot be debated here. But what particularly concerns us is the corollary to such assumptions, that before this grand climacteric England was negligible at sea; and that, as it has recendy been put, ‘the basis on which England established itself in 1588 as the first naval power of Europe was created only during the previous two decades.’

Historiography of the years immediately preceding the English civil war has tended to conceive of two disparate entities in politics, Westminster and the localities. There are in practice two distinct kinds of history, reflecting diis division, which connect only on rare occasions. The latest major work on the period can, despite its title, limit itself almost entirely to the confines of Westminster and the court, while the student is faintly aware of volumes of local works which contain scarcely a hint of what passes outside the town wall or beyond the county boundary. Parliament was indeed an aggressively self-conscious and independent body, and the county or borough was frequently particularist and introverted, but this did not preclude all contact between the two. Dr Pearl has demonstrated how vulnerable parliament was to the influence of London, and vice versa, and there have recently been several local studies which illustrate the close relationship between the county and the centre. But by and large, Clarendon's assessment of the importance of the Buckinghamshire petition against the attempt on the Five Members, and the obvious prominence accorded by Commons leaders of both sides to petitioning, has not been sufficiently appreciated. Parliament was deeply concerned about what might be termed ‘public opinion’: events in the localities, and the reactions to parliament's policies.

The Habsburg monarchy – its Iberian branch, at least – could regard 1559 as the beginning of a new era; a lasting peace had been made with France and the new King had returned to Castile. In Europe the Empire had withstood the stresses of the previous fifty years with remarkable success: Habsburg control of the Netherlands and the thin ribbon of territories linking them with Italy remained unimpaired: in Italy, Charles V and his successor had defeated all attempts by France and the Papacy to weaken the Imperial hold on the peninsula.

John and Sarah Churchill, first duke and duchess of Marlborough, carefully destroyed most of the correspondence they received during the two years of their self-imposed continental exile. Historians, forced to rely mainly upon the Hanoverian and Jacobite papers published by Macpherson in 1775, have reached radically different conclusions on the central question of Marlborough's loyalty to the Hanoverian succession between 1712 and 1714. Klopp, Trevelyan, and J. H. and Margaret Sherman maintained that Marlborough was ‘the greatest of all trimmers’.2 On the other hand, Sir Winston Churchill, emphasizing ‘the frauds and injuries which Marlborough perpetrated upon the House of Stuart’, contended that the exiled general ‘never swerved from his fidelity to the Protestant Succession.’ A search of Hanoverian, French, and British archives has yielded new material which illuminates Marlborough's political activities during his exile.

The Elizabethan religious settlement was meant to secure the unity of England by means of religious uniformity. As a political compromise it brought eighty years of relative peace and prosperity, but as a religious compromise it failed to satisfy either Catholic or Puritan. The problem of enforcing the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559 was complicated by the lack of adequate administrative machinery. The delay in purging the commissions of the peace, the failure to promote sufficient zeal among the justices of the peace, coupled with the decline of episcopal power and disenchantment with the High Commission and the various diocesan ecclesiastical commissions, led the government in the late 1580s and early 1590s to issue special royal commissions to carefully selected magistrates for dealing with seminary priests and recusant affairs. Thus, the Elizabethan government's policy towards recusants at any given period of time was a reflection not only of the degree of tension in the international situation, but also of the need to devise effective ways of enforcing die penal laws.

The Ministry of All the Talents was essentially a coalition of three parties: the followers of Fox, of Grenville, and of Sidmouth. Yet in retrospect it was looked upon as principally a Whig ministry. This was partly because office consolidated what had hitherto been the rather uneasy alliance of Foxites and Grenvillites; partly also because for adherents of the main Foxite tradition of Whiggism the ministry of 1806 provided the only experience of government between 1783 and 1827.

A Major source of difficulty in interpreting the political thought of Dr Robert Brady, the high tory historian who imparted a new dimension to the political quarrels of late Stuart England, arises out of a limitation that he imposed upon himself in writing history. He deliberately included very little political reflection in his writings, observing that he would not ‘inlarge further upon the great Use and Advantage Those that read Old Historians may make of these Discourses, but leave that to the Judgment of Understanding Readers’. This limitation may be offset, it is suggested here, by placing Brady securely within the intellectual framework created by the contemporary theories of legal sovereignty mat had originated during the English civil war and were fast becoming tradition by the late years of Charles II. When Brady made his researches public, almost all the elements were present that were required for fashioning a theory of legal sovereignty on the lines made famous in Blackstone. Englishmen were reading Sir Thomas Smith and Sir Edward Coke on the uncontrollable authority that resided in parliament for making, confirming, repealing, and expounding laws; and many of them were by this time accustomed to associating the legislative power, itself a new expression, with sovereignty in the state. They had also learned during the civil war years to recognize law-making as the characteristic function of their high court of parliament. All that remained for the whole to fall

Robert John Wilmot Horton became associated with colonial affairs in an official capacity at a time when the Colonial Office was in the throes of a reorganization. He did not bring any previous experience to his new office, and his ability was not highly rated - ‘He had always appeared to me a particularly silly fellow’, Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, was to remark later - but his tenure as the Under-Secretary of State for War and Colonies was not devoid of success. The role he played in the reorganization of the Colonial Office, for instance, was noteworthy. He proved to be an able lieutenant to Earl Badiurst, the Secretary of State. Yet Horton attained only a limited success in his political life. By the year 1828 he was out of office, and by 1830 was out of parliament. Having reached an impasse in his political life, Horton was led to seek a colonial appointment, a decision which was also partly strengthened by his pecuniary embarrassments. He staked a claim to the Governorship of Canada, and later to the Governorship of Madras, but what he was to receive was a less coveted position, the Governorship of Ceylon.

In the belief that the immigrant Irish were not merely degraded but degrading, and in support of a cataclysmic theory of history towards which he was advancing, Friedrich Engels in 1845 was convinced that “the Irish immigrants in England have added an explosive force to English society which will have significant consequences in due course’. By ‘English society’ Engels intended that of Scotland also, but a century later the historian of die Irish in Scotland, Dr James Handley, was writing: ‘Whether die immigrant has revolted instinctively or not against die bleakness of Scottish industrialism … the fact remains mat he has not made his presence effectively felt among the forces that attempt to control it’. If, however, Engels expected too much of the Irish, Dr Handley appears to have done diem less than justice, although his use of the word ‘effectively’ may have a special significance for him.

The government of the parliamentary party during the Puritan Revolution of 1640–60 instituted changes in judicial and legal procedures to maintain its power and subdue its enemies. This study of treason trials conducted by the state will examine their legal basis and the events and activities considered treasonable. It will show the ways in which the concept of treason changed under a revolutionary government, and to what extent those trials conducted during the interregnum differed in their legal—judicial bases and content from those held before the King's death. Although there were hundreds of treason convictions during the interregnum throughout England, either by military courts-martial, or by common-law courts sitting in the provinces — as is shown by the Acts providing for die sale of estates forfeited to the Commonwealth for treason — this discussion will limit itself to trials initiated by the government in London. These state trials illustrate die political use of the treason charge; diey provide a direct link between the enactment of the interregnum treason laws and their implementation by the same legislative body. Not only was the meaning of treason determined, and die machinery of trial set up, by parliament; but who was to be tried was also decided eidier by parliament or die Council of State, and, after 1654, by the Protector and his council. It will dierefore be instructive to examine the types of treasonous action considered sufficiendy threatening to warrant parliamentary attention.

During the War of American Independence, the Treasury Board contracted for a wide range of army supplies. Opposition, both in parliament and the press, persistendy criticized the methods employed in the allocation of contracts. It was widely believed that contracts were awarded in the interests of ministerial influence, not public economy; contractors were the friends of government and enjoyed excessive profits. The most frequendy proposed alternative was to contract through public advertisement and accept the lowest tender received. This method was normally referred to as open contracting. Isaac Barre was the main opposition spokesman on matters relating to army supplies and it was his view, expressed in the House during April 1778, that ‘contracts ought to be open, and offered to the lowest bidder'. Government spokesmen and contractors sitting in the House regularly countered this argument with the assertion that open contracts’ would be prejudicial to the public service. Men inadequate to the accomplishment of the contracts, would at all times bid lower than men of ability and reputation, and they would do much more injury by serving the public badly, than the difference of expense. 'Although neither Lord North nor John Robinson, the Treasury Secretary mainly responsible for contract business, were fully satisfied with existing contract methods, they sought economies within those methods and even the Shelburne ministry, when it radically altered the contracting system for supplying the army in America in 1782, decided against the open contracts championed by friends of Shelburne when in opposition.

The Afghan war blue books of 1839 have usually been regarded as classic examples of the way official documents can be mutilated by skilful and unscrupulous editing almost to the point of forgery. Sir William Kaye's monumental and authoritative history of the first Afghan war, published in 1851, contains this crushing indictment:

I cannot, indeed, suppress the utterance of my abhorrence of this system of grabling the official correspondece of public men-sending the letters of a statesman or diplomatist into the world mutilated, emasculated-the very pith and substance of them cut is palmed upon the world has not one redeeming feature.

Property and trade must first of all be formed privately, then the flag and protection can come in as well. (Bismarck minute on Krauel to Bismarck, no. 24 of 22/4/1885, in R.Kol.A.2835.)

Since the advent of the social sciences, historians have been ploughing up large areas of well-trampled history. Sociology, for example, has lent them an expanding range of hypotheses and interpretations. In particular, studies more concerned with behavioural patterns than with the mere details of what happened have cast the traditional accounts aside. But there are dangers in this rush to produce fresh formulations. The historian, once caught in the tangle of an ingenious general explanation, abandons too easily the normal rigorous standards of historical research. Frequendy, in such cases, he fails to establish the relationship between his evidence and his generalizations. These criticisms often apply when broad concepts from political sociology are used to explain the motives and behaviour of specific politicians and groups of politicians. Any background study of the Great Reform Act is exposed to all these risks.

On 26 January 1870 die Marquis de La Valette, French ambassador to London, read to the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, ‘a long and able letter’ from Count Daru, the French Foreign Secretary. In this letter Daru suggested that Clarendon recommend to the Prussian Government some measure of reciprocal French and Prussian disarmament. Daru's proposal was immediately taken up. Clarendon wrote to the queen the same day informing her of his intention to do so and to his friend Lord Lyons, the British ambassador at Paris, saying that Count Daru could be sure he would do everything possible ‘to meet his views’. As one might expect from so easy a reception the idea of disarma- ment, especially of Franco-Prussian disarmament, was not a new one to Lord Clarendon. In his letter to Lord Lyons he described it as a subject he had ‘long had at heart’; and he informed Lyons that during the previous summer, whilst he and the Russian Foreign Secretary Gortchakoff had been at a German watering place, he had unsuccessfully proposed that Gortchakoff take up die matter with Prussia. But one must note straightaway that, however warmly Clarendon accepted the idea that he suggest disarmament to Prussia, he did not expect to be successful, i.e. he did not expect Prussia to make any move to disarm in any measure. In his letter to the queen Clarendon says that he feels failure is certain with the king of Prussia. He has some faint hopes with the Crown Prince, Queen Victoria's son-in-law, but he does not dwell on them. In his letters both to Lyons and to the queen, Clarendon says, in almost identical phrases, that while the king of Prussia does not desire war,’… far from it, his army is his idol and he will not be an iconoclast’. It is most unlikely, he continues, that the king will countenance any proposal to reduce the size of his army or to alter the Prussian system of recruitment.

Throughout its history the United Kingdom Liberal party has been a conglomerate. On the other hand, it was very rarely just an anti-Conservative Front, feeding off the grasslands of negation. Whatever the manifold stresses and strains of a given moment, the liberty-loving and reforming mentality almost invariably held together the disparate elements for purposes of positive action. And with the Conservative party essentially standstill and inherently strong at most times, this was scarcely surprising in the context of the battle for political power. That context was shaped by the break-up of the vast Liverpool-style coalition and the emergence under Lord Grey of a left-centre administration. The bundle of ideologies and interests behind Grey stuck together until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, although economic and social changes, along with alterations in the constitutional structure both springing from and causing them, did much to shift the influence they exercised. While it is true that the first and second Reform Acts were of crucial importance, the forces behind their passing should not be ignored. The hens did come before the eggs, even though the eventual arrivals were uncommonly large chickens, and hatching out was far from automatic

The writing of history involves not only the search for evidence concerning particular events, but a selection of the evidence which appears to the historian to be most relevant to his task and also the imposition of labels on this evidence, its division into categories, resulting in a neat explanatory pattern being imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated mass of information.

The last decade of the nineteenth century brought to a climax Anglo-French tensions on many colonial issues. Generally overlooked in the roll-call of disputes which centred upon Egypt but extended to Newfoundland fisheries, Siam, and West Africa as well, is the position of Madagascar between the two powers at the commencement of the difficult decade. Madagascar warrants greater attention than it has received, for, with Egypt and Newfoundland, it became in 1891 and 1892 the central problem in colonial discussions between the two governments. On the side of France the issue left feelings of bad faith and broken promises which contributed to the strained tone of relations with Great Britain during the decade. This was all the more unfortunate since Madagascar was an issue apparently settled by the colonial arrangement of 5 August 1890 between the two powers. But the instrument which might have been expected to improve relations became instead another source of discord. Madagascar, at the heart of the agreement for France, presents therefore a striking and significant example of lost opportunity in colonial diplomacy. For the diplomatic failure led inevitably to a military solution to the problems confronting France on the Grand Isle.

THIS is an attempt to provide a broad and critical analysis of British policy towards the Siamese Malay States which lay to the north of the British possessions and protectorates in the Malay Peninsula. Four of them, Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan and Trengganu, were transferred to British suzerainty in 1909 and now form part of Malaysia. The period under examination was one of unusually keen rivalry between Britain and France in the whole of mainland Southeast Asia and one of its unique features was the preservation of the independence of the Kingdom of Siam. Apart from the other needs of imperialism, the policies of die two Powers in Siam were to a considerable extent influenced by the presence of their vast colonial possessions in the periphery of Siam. These basic facts of the history of the region have, not unnaturally, led to a variety of approaches to the problem of the extension of British political control in the Malay Peninsula.

In 1914 Britain, though hesitantly, decided to enter the war, thus fulfilling her loosely-defined obligations towards the other Entente states. After the outbreak of the war, Britain was just one partner in an alliance whose members had undertaken on 5 September 1914 not to conclude a separate peace and also not even to consider any peace-offer without previous consultations. These mutual assurances were supposed to ensure a victory settlement satisfactory to all the Allies.