In spite of the current renaissance of interest and research in the history of Habsburg Spain, very little of significance has yet appeared in English on the post-Olivares period of Spanish government and policy – the period in which the Spanish monarchy declined from a position of European hegemony to that of a second-rate power, the virtually helpless prey of her continental and maritime adversaries. The nineteenth-century histories of Dunlop and Hume, which interspersed sections of court diaries with superficial, descriptive chronicles of foreign and military affairs, were not substantially improved upon by R. Trevor Davies' (admittedly posthumous) study of Spain in Decline. The more recent I studies by Professors Elliott, Lynch and Domínguez Ortiz tend to be somewhat exiguous on the years following the great crisis of 1640 (albeit to differing extents) whilst displaying a common freshness of approach and presentation. This is quite understandable, since the situation in Spanish historiography itself is not much better. The uniformly dismal, perhaps still humiliating, features of this period are a natural deterrent to study in contemporary Spain. Domínguez Ortiz and Valiente apart, researched monographs are non-existent, and it has been left to the Anglo-Saxons to venture, on a modest scale, into the uncharted territories of administrative and monetary history.

Although Dryden's literary club in Covent Garden is remembered today by the readers of Restoration literature, political clubs in Charles II's metropolis have been litde studied by the historians of his reign. Of these political clubs, it was, of course, the First Whigs' Green Ribbon Club which always made most noise in the world, both at the time of the Popish Plot and Exclusionist agitation as well as in partisan histories of that agitation. Accounts of the Club by chroniclers of the calibre of Roger North or of Sir George Sitwell exist alongside the more recent but tantalizingly, brief description from J. R. Jones. Professor Jones has exploded the myth', writes another modern historian, ‘that the Whig Green Ribbon Club was an all-powerful manipulator of mobs and riots; its importance in this field extended only to financing or helping to finance, the two great 17 November pope-burnings in 1675 and 1680, which North regarded as contrived by the club.’ But other characteristics of this club also merit attention, especially in comparison with less well-known Whig clubs in London.

In the 1530s, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell carried out fundamental changes in the Tudor state. These changes amounted to a revolution in which three elements may be distinguished: the erection of the commonwealth into a sovereign empire, the king's divorce of Catherine of Aragon, and important alterations to the nature and structure of the English church. Because of the fundamental nature of the issues involved and the threat to the established order, the revolution very soon provoked widespread discontent among all sections of society. Nevertheless, opposition was spasmodic and uncoordinated, with each group of conspirators relying on another to rise, and all looking to the emperor, Charles V, to rectify the evils which, it was thought, the king's policies had brought about. Lack of effective leadership and failure to agree about what constituted the major grievances enabled the government to deal with the dissidents one by one. Cromwell was allowed to use parliament to ratify the government's programme and to manipulate public opinion. By constant vigilance and an intelligent use of the constraints placed on the populace by the penal clauses in the statutes, he secured the observance of the more unpopular measures. In spite of the overall success of this policy, the difficulties were many, and the final outcome always in doubt. Its enforcement was thus ‘a political task of some magnitude’ for the government. Probably the most determined challenge to the revolution was presented in Ireland, where rebellion broke out in June 1534.

Historians have not been kind to Henry Rich, earl of Holland. When they have noticed him, it has been to express moral disapproval. William Godwin spoke austerely of his ‘superficial and gaudy levity’; Clarendon imputed mercenary motives for his trimming in the English civil war; other writers have deplored his general unreliability or his frivolity and cowardice; and his career has been magisterially dismissed:

The personal beauty and untimely fate of Holland [have] thrown an interest over his history which neither his capacity nor his conduct would otherwise have justified.

It has been said of James Tyrrell that his ‘main claim to distinction was perhaps his friendship with John Locke’, but his elaborate monument in Oakley church, near Brill in Buckinghamshire, although it records a number of his qualities and achievements, does not mention this. James was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Tyrrell, Knight, of Shotover House, near Oxford; his mother's father was James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh. Sir Timothy had been a Cavalier and in royal service, but his n son was to devote himself to writing books attacking the principles for which the royalists had stood. Born in London in May 1642, James Tyrrell was entered before he was fourteen as a student at Gray's Inn, but a year later he abandoned legal study and went up as a gentleman commoner to Queen's College, Oxford.

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

Complaints about corrupt administrative practices were endemic to the Tudor-Stuart state. During the reign of James I, however, the issue of corruption was transformed from a staple of political discourse to an issue which not only aggravated administrative problems but also undermined the crown's very legitimacy. With the impeachment in 1621 of James' lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, for accepting bribes while holding judicial office, parliament forged for itself a weapon capable not only of rooting out corruption but unpopular government ministers as well. When administrative reform was successfully undertaken by Charles I, it came too late to resurrect the credit of the court or to restore that identification of monarch and subjects which Elizabeth had brought to its apogee only decades before. Yet the problem posed by Jacobean corruption is complex. Many of the practices for which the Jacobean court stood condemned were characteristic of the early modern state, and energetic attempts to reform the administrative apparatus were, in fact, undertaken throughout the reign. What then differentiates Jacobean administration from that of Elizabeth or the Georges and what caused the critical failure of reform? Answers to these questions may be suggested by taking a close look at the findings and fate of several investigations undertaken by one reform-minded official.

The emergence of a coherent narrative history of England, based upon the critical use of authorities, and written in a connected fashion rather than assembled from reproduced earlier materials, is a much slower process than such a simple statement or its requirements might suggest. The process begins in earnest in the late seventeenth century, after the historian ceases being a principal protagonist in the political pamphlet warfare of the time. The narrator must take account of advances in source criticism, and he must also cope, on the level of interpretation, with national myths that his forbears among the Tudor chroniclers and the seventeenth-century contenders had created. Miss Thompson has remarked that the main purpose of Tudor chroniclers, notably Hall and Holinshed, was to praise ‘the king's illustrious ancestors, reign by reign’.

Military historians should not be content with the accurate narrative reconstruction of a war, campaign or battle. Success in the field and the generalship which produced victory or defeat can be understood only through a wider appreciation of the nature of war. Political influences, direction, control and interference; the allocation of resources between theatres of operation; manpower problems and morale; advances in military technology; relations with allies and neutrals; and all the varied logistical problems which face a commander should also engage the attention of the historian. Most wars have received sufficient treatment from the military analyst, whether scholar or soldier, to balance and enhance the work of the narrator. One conflict, however, has suffered from a surfeit of narrative accounts and a lack of broadly based analysis: the Peninsular War, 1808–14.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Marathas and the British confronted each other in India like two finalists after a series of elimination bouts. The East India Company had reduced the native princesBengal and the Carnatic to ciphers, crushed Mysore and emasculated Oudh and Hyberabad. The Marathas, under the leadership of the Sindia dynasty, of Ujjain, had extinguished the last pretensions of the Mughal emperor and reduced the Rajput states to surly submission. The defeat of Sindia and the confederated Maratha princes of Nagpur and Indore in the Anglo-Maratha war of 1803–5 was therefore historic. It confirmed the British as inheritors of the old Mughal supremacy and extinguished all hopes of a native hegemony in the subcontinent for 140 years. This defeat has hitherto been attributed to strategic error. The Marathas should, it has been argued, have adhered to their ancestral cavalry warfare and spread fire and devastation in the traditional Asiatic manner, instead of trying to beat the Europeans at their own game, with infantry and guns. Re-examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that this argument is unsound. It underestimates the competence of the Marathas in their new style of combat and misplaces the blame for their failure. Traditional methods had paid off in the past; but things had changed by 1803, and had those methods been used in the second Maratha war the margin of defeat would probably have been much wider. As it was, the British victory must be described as hard won.

In 1820 many of the leading figures in the governments of the Italian states were men who had already been prominent before 1796, and had collaborated with the French during the period of the Empire. Vittorio Fossombroni and Neri Corsini in Tuscany and Prospero Balbo in Piedmont are the outstanding examples in the years immediately following the Vienna settlement. The political survival of these men into a Europe dominated by violent reaction against the events of the preceding twenty years poses interesting questions. How had the pre-revolutionary Italian ruling aristocracies reacted to the experience of Napoleonic government, and how did this experience affect their attitude to the events of the succeeding decade?

The central place occupied by Russia in the calculations of British statesmen after the Seven Years War has long been realized. For ministers in search of a ‘system’ on the continent to set against Choiseul's threatening Système du Midi, alliance with Catherine II seemed to offer an obvious means of providing for Britain's future security. The quest for alliance with St Petersburg, indeed, formed the leitmotif of British foreign policy in the age of the American Revolution. Negotiations with Russia went on infinitely longer, and were pursued with considerably more vigour on the British side, than any comparable discussions for a continental alliance. Even before the treaties of peace were signed in 1763, Britain had made the first move in the direction of St Petersburg, and the negotiations thus initiated continued intermittently for a whole decade. Only in the late spring of 1773 did the British government finally and reluctantly concede that, without a subsidy (which London had long refused to countenance), no firm commitment could be hoped for from Russia.

From 1861 to 1865, English politicians and journalists watched with passionate interest as the United States seemed to tear itself apart over the question of slavery. During these years, English public men, politicians and writers of all qualities and degrees, gave extensive airing to their views both of slavery and of American democracy. This extensive commentary on the American conflict, and the subsequent revival of interest in parliamentary reform, have made the divisions in English opinion on the war a useful testing ground of mid-Victorian social and political attitudes. Early studies, written from the perspective of the northern victory, the abolition of slavery, and the martyrdom of Lincoln, found it difficult to comprehend the extent of pro-confederate sympathy in England. On the slavery question, the mid-Victorians seemed to have lost the abolitionist enthusiasm of their evangelical forebears in the Clapham Sect. In order to fathom this failure of English judgement, historians attempted to show that the more articulate minority, the upper echelons of mid-Victorian society, sided with an aristocratic, slave-owning south, while the less articulate majority, middle-class radicals and the working class, sided with a democratic, abolitionist north.

There can be no doubt that those who joined the officers corps in the eighteenth century became members of an exclusive club with its own distinctive values. These values were imposed on all members of the corps and, as is the case with most exclusive organizations, only a very few individuals were confident or perverse enough to challenge the group standards. The officers corps had an honour code; a set of principles which was informally enforced to ensure that each member soon learned proper from improper behaviour. When there were violations of the code the subaltern officers would bring peer group sanctions to bear in the form of social and professional ostracism until the offender cleared his name by removing the blot on his honour.

In the several works on the great controversy aroused by Governor Edward John Eyre's measures for suppressing the Morant Bay rebellion, in Jamaica in October 1865, British government reactions and decisions have been surprisingly neglected. For the best part of two years at the beginning of this period the government had to deal with a most serious political as well as colonial crisis. Two successive ministries were involved in this. Lord Russell's Liberals received news of the rebellion in the depths of the 1865–6 parliamentary recess. Public dispute was therefore kept, temporarily, at a distance which policy-makers could welcome. The government appointed, in December 1865, a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Jamaican troubles. Its report, which alone amongst official sources has attracted much attention from writers on the subject, was released shortly before the end of June 1866, when the Liberals, defeated in parliament, resigned. The Derby Conservatives then taking office continued the Liberals' policies over Jamaica and Governor Eyre, a deceptively simple task.

American local history has been much studied, but rarely integrated into the general history of the country. Although greater attention is now being paid to the connexions between local political, social and economic developments and national trends, there is still a very real disparity in historiographical emphasis between national issues and the problems of community life experienced by Americans in the past. For no period, perhaps, is this disparity so graphic as for the mid-nineteenth century; the years from about 1840 to the 1870s or the 1880s were convulsed by sectional rivalries, civil war and reconstruction, to which matters historians have devoted their attention. Steadily, however, the local communities themselves have come under scrutiny. But the major interpretation currently accepted reinforces, rather than qualifies, the general picture we have of that period, since the North, at least, is regarded as buoyant and expansive in the mid-century, pursuing with relentless self-confidence such aims as help to explain the coming, and the winning, of the Civil War; reform, moral and educational improvement, and the opening of economic opportunities to yeomen farmers, artisans and small merchants.

Augustine Birrell performed the thankless task of chief secretary for Ireland for a longer period than any of his forty-nine predecessors. His nine years of office from 1907 to 1916 included some of the most critical years of Anglo-Irish history, and ended tragically when he accepted blame for the 1916 Easter rebellion, which has haunted his political reputation ever since. Birrell has been generally condemned by the English and consigned to oblivion by the Irish. This article will reassess Birrell's work as Irish secretary by relating his actual achievements and failures to the complex problems which constituted the Liberal dilemma in Ireland. Emphasis is placed on the earlier and more successful period of Birrell's administration, which has been almost entirely neglected by English historians.

The majority of men who held the post of first lord of the Admiralty in the middle nineteenth century were usually of mediocre standard, and in the 1840s, significantly or not, were generally ex-governor generals of India. Sir James Graham was an exception; he had a first class mind and only narrowly missed being prime minister. He was also never governor general, although he must have been offered the post more frequently than any other man of his time! Given the dangerous international situation at the beginning of Lord Aberdeen's ministry, and the importance of naval preparedness and planning, it was plain that an experienced man was needed to head the Admiralty. Sir James was the natural choice. He had, after all, been first lord before, from 1830 to 1834, and while there he had been responsible for radical changes in naval administration. It so happened that his reforms were not subjected to the stresses of a large-scale European war until after their originator had returned to the post of his youth, and it will be the main aim of this paper to study how the reformed Admiralty tackled some of the problems of major warfare, and the way in which Sir James interpreted his powers and duties.

The rise of modern Catalan nationalist sentiments dates from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In essence, these sentiments reflected a growing political, intellectual and, to a lesser extent economic resentment within the region of Catalonia against the Restoration regime which was imposed upon Spain in 1875. The breakthrough of Catalan nationalism, or regionalism as it is sometimes called, to become a significant force in Spanish politics followed the victory of four Catalanist candidates in the elections to the Cortes of 1901. Shortly afterwards the groups responsible for that electoral success came together to establish what was, with the possible exception of the Socialists (P.S.O.E.), the first modern political party of Spain, the Lliga Regionalista. Significantly, the foundation of the Lliga marked a turning point in the nature of Catalan nationalism, or at least its dominant strain. Of the four candidates elected in 1901, all for Barcelona seats, three represented economic interests. Indeed, much more than that, they were, or had been, presidents of three of the most powerful big business organisations of the region.

The Third Reform Act has never received the attention which historians have given to its famous predecessors, though its political effects were arguably the most profound of the three. And though there was not the same pressure from extra-parliamentary agitation as in 1831–2 or 1866–7, the enactment of a major electoral reform in 1884–5 predictably overshadowed other parliamentary business. Lord Kimberley saw this clearly in 1883: ‘From the time when we propose the extension of the county franchise until (by some Government) the Redistribution of Seats is carried, there will be a political crisis and all other measures will be practically postponed.’ But in their explanations of the prolonged controversy, which lasted until the end of November 1884, historians have become absorbed in the tactical aspects of the political game and have tended to lose sight of the substantive issues at stake. Charles Seymour stated in 1915 that ‘the question of reform in 1884 was…fought out, not on principles, but upon the method of procedure’. Professor Weston has depicted the situation in terms of a Tory ‘cave’ fostered by the queen, forcing negotiation upon a reluctant Salisbury; while Dr Fair, in seeking to rebut her argument, has taken a similar standpoint to Seymour's. ‘It was not the details of reform or redistribution which were at stake. It was a spirit of mutual distrust.’