When the judge of the High Court of Admiralty, Dr Julius Caesar, rode south from London to Lewes on 26 June 1591 1 an important experiment was initiated in the Admiralty court's continuing quest for greater respect and authority. The judge was setting out on a circuit of the troubled south and west coast of England in hopes of forcing the local authorities in those regions to submit to the supremacy of the High Court of Admiralty.2An examination of the prelude to the circuit and of the circuit itself, as well as an appraisal of its aftermath, will provide us with an instructive view of the tension between the local authorities and the central Government at the end of the sixteenth century. If there were a marked reduction in the quality of central government leadership at the end of Elizabeth's reign, one cause was perhaps the unsubdued strength of the provinces coupled with the corruption of Crown officers who were beyond the effective control of Westminster.

It has long been a commonplace among historians of eighteenth-century England that effective participation in the political affairs of the nation was confined to the privileged few. The substantial truth of this is undeniable, but its recognition has carried with it the questionable assumption that there were

Two worlds of politics in the eighteenth century—a tight political establishment, linked to small groups of powerful managers in the provinces, who controlled parliament, the executive, and all that was effective in the nation, and outside this an amorphous mass of political sentiment that found expression in occasional hysteria and impotent polemic, but whose effective voice in the nation was negligible.

Chartist internationalism has usually been treated as a peripheral question in the consideration of some broader topic—the history of the labour movement or of Chartism or communism—or as an element in the background of some radical's biography. It has, however, played a much larger part for Marxist writers, particularly in its embodiment in the Fraternal Democrats, with whom Marx and Engels were for a time associated.

Much has been written about the history of the Cobden-Chevalier treaty, partly because of the eminence of the persons involved in its negotiations and partly because of its significance in Anglo-French relations. By far the most detailed and up-to-date account is that of A. L. Dunham. Besides this valuable contribution to the history of the treaty, accounts of it can be found in nearly all the biographies and personal reminiscences of British statesmen of that period. In addition a large number of articles and monographs have been devoted to it on both sides of the Channel. All these accounts usually contain three main points concerning the origin of the treaty. The first of these is that by the close of 1859 the state of Britain's finances offered yet another opportunity for a major reform of the tariff, and that no one was more conscious of this opportunity than Gladstone, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was particularly concerned about annuities worth £2 million, due to mature the following year, and was determined that this large sum of money should not‘ pass into the great gulf of expenditure there to be swallowed up ’. He informed Richard Cobden that if under the favourable financial circumstances nothing was done for ‘trade and die masses, it would be a great discredit and a great calamity ’.2 Secondly, that while Gladstone was resolved that the large sum at his disposal should not be wasted, the enthusiasm of persons who had no official position, particularly Cobden and Michel Chevalier, directed his attention to the possibility of using that amount to further Anglo-French commercial relations.

In all three great imperial powers of Western Europe, imperialism acquired a popular following only in the 1890s. This change in public attitudes was particularly striking in France. For most of the 1880s the French public had seemed at best indifferent, at worst violently hostile, to colonial expansion. The Tunisian expedition had helped to bring down Jules Ferry's first ministry in 1881; the proposed Egyptian expedition brought down Freycinet in 1882. Three years later Ferry was hounded not merely from office but virtually from public life after an insignificant military setback in Tonkin. At the elections of 1885 the Opposition reserved its most virulent invective for the attack on colonial expansion, and even the Moderate Republicans felt obliged to condemn the politique d'aventures which they had previously supported.2

The deep-seated hostility of the railway companies of the United Kingdom to trade unionism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is well known to students of labour history. The foundations of that hostility were two-fold. Railway companies objected to the organization of their employees by outside bodies because this was felt to endanger discipline; in consequence, directors saw the growth of collective bargaining procedures as an attempt to divide responsibility for die running of the railways, and hence as a threat to public safety, for which they, the directors, were responsible. Moreover, the large companies had strong paternalist leanings, and provided their men with many of the housing, educational, recreational and medical facilities associated with a welfare state; they expected loyalty in return, and were quick to react when this loyalty was not forthcoming. Though trade unionism on the railways can be traced back at least to 1848, none of the early organizations survived. Collective bargaining, even in its most elementary form, the presentation of petitions by elected representatives of the men, was strongly discouraged.4

One of the most fertile grounds for diplomatic and journalistic speculation in the late 1920s was the series of private meetings between Sir Austen Chamberlain and Benito Mussolini. During Sir Austen's tenure of the Foreign Secretary's portfolio, from November 1924 to June 1929, the two met five times in complete privacy, without aides or even interpreters, since both spoke fluent French. The communiqués they subsequently issued were conglomerations of clichés, stressing their personal friendship and political harmony but omitting any specific reference to the subjects discussed. It is not surprising, therefore, that rumours of secret agreements and cynical deals abounded. Indeed, Mussolini was compelled publicly to deny the widespread assumption diat he sought and received Sir Austen's approval for Italian foreign policy at these meetings,1 while Chamberlain was obliged to take his holidays in 1927 in Spain to avoid the ’ undesirable political speculation ‘ that would have followed another visit to his beloved Italy.2 The evidence of the Chamberlain Papers and the British and Italian diplomatic documents suggests that much of the speculation was very wide of the mark.3

Only at four by-elections in twentieth-century British history has there been a turnover of more than 18,000 votes: at Dudley in 1968, at Orpington in 1962, at East Fulham in 1933 and at Dartford in 1920. Dartford and Orpington have been commented upon as landmarks in the histories of the Labour and Liberal Parties respectively, and Dudley is likely to be seen as the outstanding manifestation of discontent with the economic policies of the Labour Government in the 1960s. East Fulham, however, is the most notorious of all the “boilover’ by-elections. Taking place in a decade troubled by depression and fear of war, it resulted in a National Government majority of 14,521 votes being transformed into a Labour Party majority of 4,840, on a massive swing of 26–5 per cent.