The death of the marquis of Santa Cruz (9 February 1588) left the Spanish Armada leaderless. On 14 February, for reasons that have never seemed remotely satisfactory, Philip II named Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, 7th duke of Medina Sidonia, to take his place. Medina Sidonia has been universally regarded rather like a rabbit pulled mystifyingly out of a hat by the king to the amazement of rabbit, spectators, and historians alike. Attempts to explain the appointment have been half-hearted and, until some recent revaluations of the duke's administrative abilities, have concentrated overwhelmingly on his character and social position. Portrayed as an amiable poltroon, loyal, unassuming, and characterless, utterly devoid of military experience but not too proud to be guided entirely by his expert advisers, he was just the man to do what he was told without questioning the instructions of the real admiral of the Armada in the Escorial, or cavilling at his subordination to the supreme commander of the invasion forces, the duke of Parma—issues which had already embittered relations between the king and the marquis of Santa Cruz. At the same time, personal jealousies among Santa Cruz's leading lieutenants, the refusal of the military to accept seamen on equal terms, and the presence in the Armada of a large number of titled and class-conscious gentlemen-adventurers all meant that the new commander had to be an outsider, a landsman, and a nobleman so illustrious that nobody need be ashamed to obey him or take precedence behind him. As the premier duke in Spain, Medina Sidonia's social qualifications were impeccable.1 Some historians have pointed to the duke's religious devoutness as a further recommendation, others have wondered whether his promotion were not a sentimental memento of an extinct romance between Philip and the duke's mother-in-law.

Why was Thomas Hobbes never made a Fellow of the Royal Society? The question has been asked and answered in nearly all the intellectual biographies and other such studies of Hobbes, as well as in several of the histories of the early Royal Society itself. Since I wish to discuss the same question again, it is worth pausing first of all to neutralize two possible doubts about the value of this exercise.

Until 1793, the judicial policy of the Company's Government in Bengal was guided only by expediency and tradition. The tradition was that of the Moghul government which entrusted the management of civil justice to the Executive and those in charge of collection of revenue; 1 and the expediency—that of discharging the responsibilities of the Diwani with as little spending from the profits as possible. This is clearly visible in Warren Hastings's administrative arrangements of 1772 under which the civil judiciary in the mofussil was consigned to the District Collectors of revenue. With few interruptions marked by Hastings's administrative experiments,2 the practice of keeping the revenue and judicial functions united continued for the following twenty years. In 1790, when for the first time the Company took over the administration of criminal justice, the District Magistracy was also vested with the Collector. He thus became the Judge, Magistrate and Collector, all in one. This ‵single officers′ plan for the Districts had been advocated by Sir John Shore as being in conformity with the tradition with the Indians looking up to a single despotic authority for the redress of all their grievances,3 and had found favour with the Directors4 for the economy involved.

The Benthamites or Utilitarians are often held to have been at least partly responsible for the Reform Act of 1832. To historians who make this attribution, Bentham's own writings have not been a help. They are generally too abstract and difficult to have been popular; and where (as in the Parliamentary Reform Catechism) they have an avowed practical purpose, they are at once too detailed and too extreme to be easily related to practical legislation. James Mill, on the other hand, claimed to be disciple of Bentham, held administrative office, and wrote short tracts which are known to have circulated among a whole generation of young liberals in the 1820s.2

The concept of imperialism which Hobson, Lenin and the combined force of the international socialist movement forged into an idée fixe of the twentieth century was roughly handled by Western scholars long before 1945. But since then the attack has grown more precise and its character has altered. Among the first of the post-war historians (writing in English) to attempt the dethronement of imperialism as the demi-urge of the period between 1870 and 1914 was Richard Koebner. He determined on a semantic approach and put the term's linguistic history to rigorous scrutiny. On the philosophical assumption that a term's meaning is to be defined by its actual use and provenance in the political discourse in which it arose, he found that the modern concept of economic imperialism sprang out of a limited, local controversy over the nature of the Boer War. He concluded that it had been illicitly mated with other forms of militarism and economic expansion to spawn a hybrid, mythical monster that had been allowed to sprawl its length over more than half a century of world history.1

Four notable General Elections in the years 1900–10 helped to undermine faith in the great fixed stars by which Victorian statesmen had set their course. A great Liberal majority filled the House of Commons and was augmented by the representatives of organized labour; within the Conservative party the votaries of Tariff Reform imposed their new orthodoxy. We now know a good deal about the attitudes and actions of men at the heart of politics, and something about the electoral calculations upon which their hopes of achieving or maintaining power were based. But, as Dr Kitson Clark has reminded us, ′elections are won or lost in the constituencies, and in order to learn what happened in any given general election it has proved to be necessary to make a rather close local study of particular constituencies′.1 Modern scholarship has cast a clearer light upon the relations between Labour and the Liberals in these years, as upon the Unionist attitude towards Tariff Reform.2 One aim of this article is to seek to explore these two themes by reference to electoral developments in one English borough. The merits of a case study of Blackburn from this point of view will, I hope, become apparent. There is also a complementary objective. While the study of ‵court′ politics may become jejune unless the Blackburns are taken into consideration, it is equally true that a parochial account would leave much about Blackburn politics unexplained. It is necessary to explore the interactions between two political worlds, to compare great things with small.

The Action Française was neither a widespread nor a powerful nor a successful political movement, and its political objectives were anachronistic to the point of absurdity. Its intention to carry out a coup d'état could not be taken seriously when its leaders were so eager to find reasons for avoiding or postponing action.1 Critics of the movement rightly claimed, for this reason, that it did not deserve its name.2 Of course, the Action Francaise always claimed to have considerable political influence, but its very poor showing in the elections of 1919 and 1924,3 when what influence it had was probably at its height, only emphasized the movement's real complexion.