The reform of crown finances was one of the most urgent and complex problems facing the English government in the second half of Edward VI's reign. As one aspect of the general regeneration of the financial system the crown appointed in 1552 a royal commission to study the state of the revenue courts. This was only one in a long series of temporary commissions established in the mid-sixteenth century to examine various aspects of the crown revenue and its administration. However, several features of this commission set it apart from similar initiatives. It was probably the most comprehensive and thorough investigation performed during this period, and the commission's findings represent the sole surviving detailed analysis of the mid-Tudor revenue system. Moreover, the commissioners went beyond a survey of the courts to make explicit recommendations for reform which have traditionally been linked to the reorganization of the royal finances in 1553–4. Although the commission's report has recently been published, both this document and the agency which produced it have hitherto escaped the detailed analysis which they well deserve and which is essential for an assessment of the report's significance.

Compared to the rather large corpus of modern writing on puritan political and socio-economic opinions, very little has reached print concerning early-seventeenth-century puritan views on the intellect and the proper uses of reason. Much of what does exist is concerned primarily with the question of a connexion between puritanism and the ‘rise of science’ or the development of a learned mentality more interested in discovery than in repetition. Debate over the connexion has centred on the role of puritanism as a catalytic philosophy which drove men to cast off the bonds of ancient (classical) wisdom and search God's handiwork for further clues to the identity of the Master himself and his providence for the world. Most argument has relied on parading puritans who were, or were not, supporters of scientific endeavour. The evidence has, in the main, been highly selective. There has been very little consideration of the intellectual background of puritanism as a school of thought. Most of the evidence, too, has been taken from the years of the Revolution, when the meaning of the term ‘puritan’ was very different from what it had been eighty, or even thirty, years earlier. This article seeks to correct both these problems of methodology and interpretation by considering puritanism as a set of ideas which could lead to but one intellectual conclusion. It is the contention here that the argument that puritanism offered incentive and support to the ‘new learning’ cannot be supported from the evidence drawn from an examination of early-seventeenth-century puritan writers.

Independent or deferential: the voters of the reign of Queen Anne have been subjected to statistical analysis and their honour has been vindicated. Recent studies of the behaviour of the early-eighteenth-century electorate have declared that these voters were independent. The mid-eighteenth-century electorate, in contrast, was deferential, and the difference between the two electorates has led to speculation about the relation of voter behaviour to social and political structure. Since the politics of Anne' reign was dominated by party, it has been suggested that the existence of party depended, in part, on the presence of an independant electorate. As the structure of mid-century politics can be described without reference to party, it has likewise been postulated that the disappearance of party is a symbol of oligarchic subversion of electoral independence. Yet it may be that the importance of party and other formal political structures as indices of change in the conduct and society of eighteenth-century Englishmen has been overestimated. If the early-eighteenth-century electorate was not as independent as recent interpretations suggest, there is no need to assume a subtle but radical alteration of social structure to explain an alteration in voter behaviour. Change in political structure may not be significantly related to the behaviour and society of England's voters.

Historians have always assumed that what has to be explained about Peel is his flexibility or constant ‘fluctuation of opinion’. Few would accuse him of having practised ‘long meditated deception’ against the party he betrayed in 1829 and 1846; it is a charge which Peel's ghost would complacently deflect by a ritual appeal to ‘conscience’. Hostile commentators have preferred to follow Disraeli in attacking Peel's most sensitive spot – his intellect. Disraeli's analysis is familiar but worth quoting because it established a context for much of the subsequent discussion.

The issues raised by eugenics are of more than passing interest for the student of political thought. In itself a minor offshoot of turn-of-the-century socio-biological thought which never achieved ideological ‘take-off’ in terms of influence or circulation, there was certainly more in eugenics than nowadays meets the eye. The following pages propose to depart from the over-simplistic identification of eugenics, as political theory, with racism or ultra-conservatism and to offer instead two alternative modes of interpretation. On the one hand, eugenics will be portrayed as an exploratory avenue of the social-reformist tendencies of early-twentieth-century British political thought. On the other, it will serve as a case-study illustrating the complexity and overlapping which characterize most modern ideologies. While recognizing, of course, the appeal of eugenics for the ‘right’, a central question pervading the forthcoming analysis will be the attraction it had for progressives of liberal and socialist persuasions, with the ultimate aim of discovering the fundamental affinities the ‘left’ had, and may still have, with this type of thinking.

Although many in the West have written on the Popular Front and its role in French or Spanish politics during the thirties, very little has been revealed about its origins. Indeed, one of the foremost historians of the Popular Front has expressed perplexity on this matter. Daniel Brower asks: ‘What brought on this change? Why had fascism suddenly assumed such threatening proportions in the eyes of Comintern leaders? To this day the answer remains obscure.’ The aim of this article is to throw some light on this question.