Current knowledge of politics during the coalition government headed by William Pitt between July, 1794 and March, 1801 resembles a fen set amid drained lands, in that neither ministerial relations within the executive nor the internal affairs of the opposition have attracted much recent attention. For the government, such attention has been directed toward questions of foreign policy and of the motives and effects of the domestic repression. For the Foxites, a relative paucity of materials and the fact of the 1797 secession have conspired substantially to halt scholarly concern at 1794. I have elsewhere attempted to redress somewhat the latter state of affairs. In this essay I propose to deal with two interrelated topics of wartime politics during Pitt's government; the nexus of allegiances among the ministers, and some procedural aspects of executive decision-making. The first, centering upon the specific question of the degeneration of the Portland Whigs, also throws some additional light on the formation of the coalition ministry; the second, attending to restrictions on participation and information and their effects on the subtle dialectic between George III and his ministers, can further explicate the fall of the government.

Selecting a name for the gold rush colony of British Columbia, although apparently trivial, embarrassed the government, threatened to become the focus for a groundswell of opposition to the whole idea of establishing a new colony, and offers a curious sidelight on the role of the Crown.

On 24 June 1858 Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, the Colonial Secretary in Lord Derby's second ministry, wrote to the Queen to inform her that “in consequence of the recent discovery of Gold in the Neighbourhood of Fraser's River, on the Western Coast of British North America, rendering expedient the immediate establishment of Civil Government,” the government had decided “to erect at once a New Colony there.” Parliament had to authorize this, “& it is desirable that the name of the new Colony shall be inserted in the Bill.” Since the measure was to be introduced within a week, the procedure was slapdash. In asking the Queen to select a name, Lytton informed her that explorers had used the name “New Caledonia,” but did point out that the name had been used elsewhere, most notably for “the chief island of the New Hebrides Group in the South Seas where the French have lately signified their intention to form an establishment.” He added that the names New Cornwall and New Hanover had also been applied to parts of the coast by some mapmakers. While the monarch retained a significant role in mid-nineteenth century government, this hardly extended to, acting as a cartographical research institute for the Colonial Office. On 27 June the Queen informed her minister that she had settled on New Caledonia as the most generally accepted name.

In the Elizabethan re-organization of the English militia the muster-master was given the responsibility of supervising the training and inspecting the equipment of the trained bands in each county. As an ex-professional captain, he supposedly provided the experience in military matters lacking among those who served in the county lieutenancy and commanded the militia.

In The Muster-Master, a pamphlet written probably by Gervase Markham around 1630, unstinting tribute is paid the Elizabethan muster-masters. Confronted with an unprecedented threat from abroad as well as occasional domestic rebellion, “the state elected so many old and experienced captains and approved officers in the wars, as might furnish every county in the kingdom with one able and sufficient commander” who would instruct the bands, inspect their armor and equipment and certify all defects to the commissioners of muster. These tasks were “faithfully and skillfully performed, not by inferiors, or petty officers, which knew no more but the bare A.B.C. of war: but by such as had run through every grammar rule thereof; such as had borne the office of captain by desert and not from private letters, gaudy clothes, or lustful employments; such as have their wounds in their faces, chasing the enemy, not such as have whole skins by running away, which they now call a violent retiring.”

Not for long, however, did this situation last. By the time of the Armada the Council unwisely shifted the burden of paying the muster-masters on to the counties while the office itself became part of the lord-lieutenant's patronage. Commenting on the rising opposition to paying the muster-master's fee in the early Jacobean period, Boynton writes that the “main complaint was apparently that, subject to the Council's formal approval, the office was venal. Not that there was anything unusual in that; but the lord-lieutenants often retained this piece of patronage for their own clients, so that the county paid but had no say in the matter.” The author of The Muster-Master was deeply troubled by the results attendant on the lord-lieutenant's monopoly of military patronage in the county.

In the last week of September 1756, Sir James Lowther of Lowther, the famous eighteenth-century boroughmonger, spent more than 58,000 pounds securing 134 burgages in the parliamentary borough of Cockermouth. When added to the twenty-four he already possessed this gave him more than half the total. As a result, he was recognized thereafter as being able to return both members for the borough. The Earl of Egremont, whose family had held the strongest interest since the borough was restored in 1641 to the ancient privilege of returning two members to parliament, was completely eclipsed. His younger brother, Percy Wyndham O'Brien, who had been returned with his support in 1754, retreated to Minehead at the 1761 election. Cockermouth was not contested again before the 1832 Reform Act, and its two members were counted among Lowther's famous ninepins.

Pocket boroughs were one result of the oligarchic structure that came to characterize English political life by the middle of the eighteenth century. The vigorous party struggles of Queen Anne's reign had melted away following the eclipse of the Tories and the passing in 1716 of the Septennial Act. In its place came the long Whig ascendancy, a period of political torpor that rendered burgage boroughs, in the words of Sir Lewis Namier, “predestined to become pocket boroughs.” Longer parliaments pushed up the cost of election contests, which in consequence became less frequent. If one did take place and the result was close, the inflated cost of canvassing was likely to be compounded by the near certainty of a petition.

The recent publication by Cambridge University Press of the third volume of G.R. Elton's collected papers and reviews nearly coincided with two other events: the appearance of a florilegium entitled Tudor Rule and Revolution and presented to him on his sixtieth birthday, and the announcement of his appointment as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge where he has been a Fellow of Clare and a mainstay of the University Department of History for three decades. During that time his work has ranged over the whole territory of the historian. Witness the scores of papers in a set of three fat volumes that is a selection and also the seventeen other published volumes of original work mainly based on archives, large narrative histories, and also books on the study and teaching of history. His major contributions also include the annual bibliography he has edited since 1977 as well as various series of monographs and archival indices which in themselves have been a major source of encouragement to the work of other scholars.

But G.R. Elton has not gathered flowers and tributes and honors because he is an industry in himself—a veritable Krupp among historians. It is rather the quality of his achievement that has been celebrated since the publication of The Tudor Revolution in Government in 1953. Once the radical theses of that book had been incorporated into the text England Under the Tudors (1955), the importance of his work has never been in doubt. Subsequent debates in Past and Present and other journals, with Oxford medievalists and London Elizabethans, showed the impact of his main ideas.

The English Royal Navy's relationship with Scotland during the years preceding the Union of 1707 is usually cast as problematic in scholarly discussion, with the navy viewed as the enforcer of an embargo on Scottish trade with France. This study examines the Scottish use of Royal Naval convoy in the first years of the War of Spanish Succession through to 1707, focusing on the North Sea region. It adds nuance to security issues surrounding the parliamentary union by arguing that convoys to Scotland were more frequent than generally acknowledged, an improvement on the situation in the 1690s, and that when combined with the small Scottish navy, provided coverage that largely met Scottish needs. As a result, in a period of otherwise fierce debate, naval protection for Scotland was relatively uncontroversial. Convoy was therefore an unusual, if belated, success for regal union, and that success meant that Scots were more deeply enmeshed in the English system of maritime security than has been often been credited.

The necessity of adopting or redefining illiberal measures—such as torture, internment, or targeted-killings of terrorists—to protect states places burdens on the meaning of liberalism around the world. After 1969, liberal intellectual responses to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland identified two conflicted groups of Irish liberals. Then academic and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien attempted to reduce responses to the crisis to the choice between supporting the state and condoning terrorism. “Consenting liberals” compromised professional practices in the law, journalism, broadcasting, and academia to support the state's counterinsurgency. Alternatively, “dissenting liberals” defended their “neutrality” alongside the freedom to criticize the counterinsurgency. Justifying infringements on individual freedoms, O'Brien and others said the democratic state was imperiled. But, anomalously, freedoms were sacrificed in defense of the Irish state, which in security terms did little to defend itself. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency became an organizing principle in intellectual life, and over forty years colored self-perceptions of Irish society, past and present.

William Austin (1802–1857), the child of Deptford laborers, was adopted de facto as an infant by Princess Caroline, the estranged wife of the Prince of Wales. She rendered the child's identity such a mystery that it prompted the Delicate Investigation in 1806, a quasi-judicial affair published in 1813 in the vexed volume known as The Book. “Prince Austin” was regularly on stage during Caroline's carnivalesque rambles on the Continent from 1814 to 1820, frequently attacked in the loyalist press as “that bastard Billy Austin.” In the uproar of the Queen Caroline affair in 1820, Austin remained a target of loyalist scorn. Because Queen Caroline named him her residuary legatee at her death in 1821, his name registered aftershocks of queenite disruption through the middle of the century. In these narrative contests about Austin's identity, the metonymic traffic between a provisional family form and an absolutist national model bobbed and weaved in a disorderly fashion on the conspicuous stage of a dysfunctional royal family. On this prominent platform, adoptive contingency intermittently confounded closed absolutism.

Throughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.

W. E. Gladstone resigned twice as leader of the Liberal Party. His final retirement of 1894 has received much attention, but his resignation two decades earlier is not well known. At age sixty-five, the recent loser in a surprise general election, the former prime minister stepped down from the Liberal leadership in January, 1875. Some observers doubted the permanence of his retirement, but previous speculation about the Liberal succession had assumed that Gladstone could hope at most for one further premiership. After he regained the leadership in 1880 and soldiered on as the Grand Old Man at the head of three further governments, Liberal sympathizers dismissed his 1875 resignation in retrospect as an unrevealing mistake, a temporary meandering from the true path of his career.

Recent studies have pointed to the decisive importance of Gladstone's course in the 1870s, especially to the implications of his return to public life. R. T. Shannon ties Gladstone's resignation to his loss of rapport with the popular forces that had once rallied to the banners of Reform and Irish disestablishment. His government's rejection at the polls in 1874 seemed to end “his great romance with the people of England.” Bitter, disillusioned, and mystified about the popular verdict, he resigned his post as Liberal leader. Freed from parliamentary responsibilities, Gladstone went on, almost in spite of his conscious intentions, to capture the soul of popular Liberalism, beginning with his hesitant but inspiring participation in the 1876 agitation against the Bulgarian atrocities, a campaign which held few attractions for the official Liberal hierarchy.