In his pioneering study of the British electoral system, David Butler notes that “One of the main problems of the historian of the second Labour Government is to discover what action the Liberals took to exact the fullest return for their support in the division lobbies.” Owing to the preponderance of economic issues in this period, however, scant attention has been focused on the constitutional question of electoral reform which had the greatest bearing on the relationship between the Liberal and Labour parties in Parliament. Robert Skidelsky's Politicians and the Slump, the most thorough economic and political analysis of the Second Labour Government, is curiously jejune on this subject. Recent biographers of Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George, the Labour and Liberal protagonists, describe in detail a series of joint enterprises between the parties, but they fail to delineate the precise nature of their relationship in light of the critical electoral reform question. And Butler was never able to come to close quarters because of a paucity of primary sources. Now, however, it is possible to merge these separate strands, along with a neglected Conservative view, into a comprehensive explanation of the Liberal-Labour nexus.

Despite much suspicion by contemporaries, especially among Conservatives in Parliament and the press, of a supposed Lib-Lab “bargain, ” it was repeatedly denied by prominent Liberal and Labour members. In light of the inability of historians to produce even a shred of evidence to the contrary and the glaring lack of legislative cooperation, it must be concluded that there was never any formal alliance between the two parties. Nevertheless a strong, and as yet unspecified, attachment did exist as a result of the unique parliamentary circumstances emerging from the general election of 1929. What emerges is an unattractive picture of political manuevering, calumny, and subterfuge where the potential allies worked at cross-purposes—the object of the Government being to create conditions favorable to retaining office while the Liberals desired some greater prospect for attaining office in the future. Despite their interdependence, the party leaders were never able to reach an agreement on the vital issue of electoral reform, which would involve some possible sacrifice of their individual ends. The result was a process of mutual destruction which contributed to the fall of the Second Labour Government and opened the way for a Conservative bid for power.

The Instrument of Government was England's first and, if we except the Humble Petition and Advice, its only written constitution. It lasted only a little over three years, from 1653 to 1657, and was soon cast aside and all but forgotten in the rapid sequence of events which followed Cromwell's death: the restoration of the Rump, then of the Long Parliament, and finally of the King himself. Thus it is definitely an aberration so far as English constitutional development is concerned, but to an American, in whose country the principle of the written constitution and its concomitant principle of the limitation of legislative sovereignty have won out, the Instrument is of much greater interest.

In order to comprehend fully why the Instrument was made and what it was designed to achieve, the role of the New Model Army and its relation to Parliament must be considered. This army had become a quasi-political body as far back as the summer of 1647 when it first assumed the role of champion of political reform. In its Declaration of the Army it declared that it was not “a mere mercenary army, hired to serve an arbitrary power of a State, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defense of their own and the people's just rights and liberties.” From there it had gone on to submit various proposals for the settlement of the kingdom, such as the Heads of the Proposals and the Agreement of the People.

The activities of medieval monarchs were severely circumscribed by the environment in which they had to operate. They were at the mercy of events in a more acute sense than many modern historians realize. Difficulties of communication in particular could play havoc with royal policy such that a mooted response to a problem that had arisen could be redundant before effected. Most difficult of all would be consistency in terms of royal policy except in the most general understanding of that term, and indeed it could be argued that those historians who do tend to see “consistency” in the policies of medieval monarchs are superimposing onto their subjects an order they desire for their own mental processes.

Much of what has been said so far is applicable to Henry II in his dealings with Irish Sea politics. Henry was overlord of a vast empire through which he constantly circulated and in which the Irish Sea region was but a small part. It was seldom his most important consideration. In his dealings with Ireland and its neighbors, it should always be remembered that this was a region that commanded his attention fitfully, either on its own or as part of a larger whole. It would appear that Henry did try to pursue some limited kind of consistency in areas of his Irish Sea diplomacy. He could also be inconsistent. He could and did find himself at the mercy of events and had to react accordingly.

Enclosure riots were a prominent manifestation of social tension in England in the 1530's and 1540's. Although enclosures of land for pasturage and tillage had been undertaken since the beginning of English agriculture and did not usually cause social conflict, the rapid increase in population of the sixteenth century pressed hard on the available supply of land. The necessity of increasing the food supply speeded up the process of enclosure. The supplies of corn and meat could not be increased significantly without the year-round use of enclosed and consolidated plots of land, which was inconsistent with communal access to common and waste land and the stubble remaining after the harvest on arable lands. Other causes of friction in agrarian society included the greater fluidity in the land market resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries together with revolutionary methods of exploiting the land. The social relationships existing among great landlords, small holders and tenants could not remain unaffected.

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the early Tudor enclosure riot as a primitive or pre-political form of social protest. This will necessitate: (1) describing the forms and extent of violence employed; (2) distinguishing between those riots that accompany the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellions of 1548-49 and those riots that occur outside of the years of rebellion; and (3) modifying the assumption that the typical enclosure riot was perpetrated by an exasperated peasantry venting their rage upon the hedges and ditches of a commercially-minded, grasping gentry.

To attempt to portray Anselm in all his varied activities as monk, prior, abbot, archbishop; as philosopher, theologian, writer of private prayers and meditations; in his letters of spiritual counsel and ecclesiastical policy; as man of God, friend, teacher and guide to the spiritual life; and in his relations with popes, kings, episcopal colleagues, lay men and women, monks and nuns, is one of the most challenging tasks in medieval history. The number of possible combinations in which his life and thought played a part is very large. To add to the difficulties of the subject, much of the evidence is tangential: we interpret for one purpose material that was created for quite different ends. The material is full enough to invite speculation, but rarely full enough to provide clear-cut solutions to the questions asked. To take only two examples at opposite ends of the spectrum: Anselm never wrote any account of the principles which guided his public life as archbishop, which Vaughn is particularly concerned to interpret; and, at the other end of the scale, he wrote much on friendship, but all that he wrote, as we shall see, is capable of widely different interpretations. Even his silences cry aloud for interpretation; and when we come to that, we are in very deep water indeed.

In most histories of Great Britain in the eighteenth century the ministry of Henry Pelham, 1743 to 1754, is accorded small space. For example, Basil Williams' The Whig Supremacy, in the Oxford History of England, devotes only slightly more than thirty pages to these eleven years. No full-scale biography of Pelham has appeared since Archdeacon Coxe's enormous two-volume work in 1829, and this, as Macaulay wrote of a similar work, was the product of the author's scissors and paste pot rather than of his pen. Much has been done on phases of the career of Newcastle, but no complete biography has been attempted. It has been suggested that the enormous mass of material in the Newcastle and Hardwicke papers available in the Manuscript Room of the British Museum has scared off possible biographers. This, however, is not the only explanation. At one time I gave serious consideration to devoting several years to a full biography of the Duke; but in the end it was the quality of Newcastle and not the quantity of the material which deterred me.

The neglect of Pelham, however, is more puzzling; and appears to be a case of unsalutary neglect. Possibly the best explanation lies in the Pittolatry (if the term is allowable) of the great majority of both English and American historians writing on this period. Usually Pelham is not even ranked as a John the Baptist to William Pitt, but rather is treated in the same relationship to him as the older interpretation of the Old Regime in France is to the French Revolution and the Unreformed House of Commons to the Reform Bill of 1832.

With the recent four hundredth anniversary of the sailing of the Spanish Armada came a virtual flood of new works concerning the great invasion fleet and the English ships that opposed it. While it would seem that there would be little new to say about such a heavily researched subject, there is one aspect of this momentous year that has been received relatively short shrift by historians of the period, the national mobilization of England to meet the threatened invasion. Often referred to as the Great Muster of 1588 because one of its most important elements was the muster of the militia to fill the ranks of the army, it was an administrative feat of massive scope that involved months of preparation, extensive military planning, and precise timing. Because these arrangements were never tested in battle, however, the effectiveness of this effort is hard to judge, and its importance is often missed by historians. While Garrett Mattingly devoted an entire chapter of his well known work on the Armada year to events on land, he found the queen's visit to the army at Tilbury after the departure of the Armada more important, or at least more interesting, than the actual state of the nation's defense. More recently, Geoffrey Parker has used the discovery of a large quantity of siege equipment on an excavated armada wreck as a jumping off point for his article “If The Armada Had Landed.” Approaching the issue from the standpoint of a historian of the Army of Flanders, and leaning heavily on continental sources, he adheres to the view that England was totally unprepared for fighting on land if the Spanish had succeeded in landing troops on the island. While this view reflects the common opinion of both nineteenthand twentieth-century historians on the subject, a careful review of English sources, particularly the surviving muster records, military papers, and coastal surveys, leaves a good deal of doubt concerning the accuracy of Parker's judgment. It is the purpose of this article to examine the English side of the story of the Great Muster of 1588, by illustrating the extensive defensive preparations that were organized to face the Spanish threat.

The climax in the long story of Britain's blunders during the War of Independence is the campaign of 1777, the planning of which, in Whitehall and New York, was the worst that the British perpetrated in the seven years of hostilities. Their strategy in 1781 was even more disastrous in its outcome, but far more defensible in its design; the strategy of 1777 can scarcely be defended at all. It rested upon premises that many observers at the time recognized to be wildly fallacious, and it brought its due reward — the surrender that led directly to French intervention.

The campaign had no unifying concept. An army from Canada advanced by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson toward Albany, where it was supposed to be joined by a small detachment marching down the Mohawk; far to the south a substantial garrison was immobilized on Manhattan, while the main field army attacked Philadelphia by the most roundabout route it could have chosen. The British thus had three armies (ignoring, as they tended to do, their small garrison on Rhode Island), each isolated from the other two; and the Americans were free to concentrate against whichever one they chose. This was dispersion of force carried to the point of absurdity. Why was the absurdity not apparent to the Commander in Chief? to General Burgoyne? to the King's ministers in London? The question has been endlessly debated, and no final answer is possible. But an examination of the men who were principally responsible for the outcome suggests that two major factors were at work.