In the winter of 1561/2 Henry Machyn, citizen of London, noted two special events in his diary: the extraordinary Christmas revels at the Inner Temple and the performance on 18 January, before Queen Elizabeth, of a play and a masque by these same gentlemen. These events are inextricably connected and in terms of political propaganda must be viewed in conjunction. The play was Gorboduc, written by two Inner Templars, the Queen's cousin Thomas Sackville and the Protestant Parliamentarian Thomas Norton. The revels at the Inner Temple celebrated the accession and reign of Robert Dudley as the lawyers' Christmas Prince. He had been chosen by the governors and Parliament of the Inner Temple in gratitude for his intervention in a dispute with the Middle Temple over Lyons Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery historically under the jurisdiction of the Inner Temple. Dudley had intervened with the Queen, opposing his influence against that of Sir Robert Catlin, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir James Dyer, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who had championed the cause of their old Inn, the Middle Temple. Elizabeth was moved by her favourite to speak to Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, asking him to confirm the right of the Inner Temple. The grateful Parliament and governors of the Inner Temple pledged themselves and their successors to Dudley, offering their legal skills in his service and promising never to give counsel in a cause against Lord Robert. The value of this pledge to Elizabeth's chief suitor from men as eminent as Richard Onslow, Anthony Stapleton, Robert Kelway, William Pole, Roger Manwood and Richard Sackville is clear. The elevation of the favourite to the dignity of Prince Pallaphilos was in terms of propaganda a very splendid return for Dudley's intervention on the Templars' behalf. Nor was this pledge of loyalty ephemeral; the bond was mutually advantageous and it was one the Templars continued to honour. In 1576 the Parliament of the Inner Temple still referred to Leicester as ‘chief governor of this House’.

Anyone who studies eighteenth-century British politics soon becomes aware of a lack of definite form in the major institutions of government. Contemporaries, although equally aware of this imprecision, did not consider that it detracted from the utility of the constitution. On the contrary the vagaries of the system were often cited as its chief asset, permitting such apparently irreconcilable elements as parliamentary supremacy and a royal executive to exist together in balanced harmony. Burke, the constitution's most eloquent defender, called this quality of comprehensiveness a ‘unity in so great a diversity of its parts’, and believed that such unity was capable of sheltering both prescriptive rights and necessary adaptations in society. But the quality which men of the eighteenth century were agreed to admire has been viewed less sympathetically by later writers, intent on clarifying points which contemporaries preferred to leave open. The whig historians of the nineteenth century attempted to cut through difficulties by treating as unworthy of consideration in the eighteenth-century scene those features which did not survive in the era of reform. The misinterpretations which thereby arose brought about a necessary reaction in the present century, especially from the late Sir Lewis Namier whose research revealed the Georgian scene as having a more traditional structure of politics and society than was previously supposed. But Namier's own work too paid disproportionate attention to parts of the scene at the expense of others, though he undoubtedly did so because the difficulty of dislodging a well-established whig orthodoxy led him to overstate his case.

Prior to 1944, the interpretation of the British anti-slavery movement was dominated by the ‘humanitarian’ ideas of the school of imperial historians centred round the great Sir Reginald Coupland. The turning point in slave trade and slavery studies came with the publication of Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery, significantly enough published at Chapel Hill—it would be interesting to find out whether the manuscript had previously been submitted to any English firms. In his bibliography, Williams remarked of Coupland that he ‘represents the sentimental conception of history; his works help us to understand what the anti-slavery movement was not’. But the attack went much further than personalities. Capitalism and Slavery included evidence which stood the more traditional interpretation on its head, while its conclusions rejected the simple moral motivation which had previously been picked out as the main factor behind the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. The whole thesis of Williams' book was that while the moral awakening of which Coupland and his followers had written may have genuinely affected the behaviour of individual supporters of abolition, the root cause of the abandonment of the slave trade and later of West Indian slavery was a change in the balance of economic pressure groups. Building on the work of Lowell Joseph Ragatz, Williams suggested that the anti-slavery movement was a group response of the middle class, to a decline in the relative power of the West India interest on the one hand, and a change in the needs of the increasingly industrialized society in which they lived on the other.

The first part of this study of Mill sought to show how much less radical he was on the subject of Irish land reform than is often supposed. In the earlier editions of the Principles of Political Economy from 1848 to 1857 there were passages which constituted a terrible indictment of landlordism, and insisted on the need for legislation to convert the tenant farmers into joint owners of their holdings: but in another passage this harsh criticism was substantially withdrawn, and the demand for fixity of tenure effectively retracted. Although they continued to reproduce the criticism and the call for a drastic measure, the editions of 1862 and 1865 were more moderate still in their conclusions on Irish land. With the progress of the changes in the economy and society set in motion by the Great Famine, Mill became more strongly convinced that the country should be left to evolve slowly under the existing law of tenure, only slightly amended. One cannot imagine Mill saying, ‘tenant-right…is equivalent to landlords' wrong’: but he and Palmerston were none the less in nearly complete agreement by 1865 on the degree of laissez-faire that was desirable in Ireland. For all his strictures upon aristocratic misgovernment and middle-class prejudice, Mill was too warm an admirer of British institutions to want to undermine their social basis over a wide area of the United Kingdom. The second part of this study deals with his action and his motives, in briefly advocating, without any reservations this time, the revolutionary land legislation from which he had always previously shrunk, despite his brave words written for the earlier editions of the Principles.

The separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent developments in Scandinavian politics evoked in British diplomacy a concern and an activity which are remarkable in view of the neglect into which Baltic questions had fallen during the preceding half-century. This new concern (like the previous neglect) can be explained satisfactorily only by reference to changing strategic circumstances. The diplomatic events are of interest not only because of the light which they shed upon the evolution of wider European politics at the time, but also because of their relation to strategic calculations; and they provide one of the rare instances before 1914 in which the direct influence of the Committee of Imperial Defence on foreign policy can actually be demonstrated.

Both the Entente and the Central Powers interpreted the ascension of Benedict XV to the papal throne in the fall of 1914 as signalling a reinvigoration of Vatican foreign policy. Indeed there was little reason to expect that Giacomo Delia Chiesa, elected successor to Pius X on the morning of 3 September, would be passive in a diplomatic sense. As Rennell Rodd, the British ambassador to the Italian court remarked a few days after Benedict's election, the new Pontiff's first acts gave promise of prefacing a ‘vigorous and interesting reign.’.

A great deal of published historical work has been devoted to establishing the causes and chronology of the demise of the Liberal party in British politics. The downfall of the Liberals has been ascribed to the inevitable outflanking development of the Labour party; to the mutilation of Liberal principles involved in waging the first ‘total’ war; to the personal rifts and feuds between the rival followers of Asquith and Lloyd George—and to various combinations of these factors. Yet there has been no detailed analysis of the division within the Parliamentary Liberal party during the First World War. Although at the end of 1916 obviously certain Liberals supported Asquith and others Lloyd George, no attempt has been made to examine the way in which the rifts in the party were reflected in political action in the House of Commons during the time of the second coalition government, nor to determine accurately the lines of division in the party. An answer to the question of ‘How did the Liberal party divide during the First World War?’ has proved elusive, although some historians of the period have been more successful than others.

Histories of the Second World War rarely describe the impact of that conflagration upon the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. Such omission is not surprising, yet the German efforts to assimilate this allegedly Germanic borderland reveal interesting aspects of National Socialist totalitarian methods.