Some time soon after the execution of Charles I, the new rulers of England began seriously to consider imposing an oath of loyalty to the new republic. On 22 February the Council of State were directed to take an ‘Engagement’ to the regime, and for the rest of 1649 there were periodic suggestions to extend this Engagement to wider sections of the political nation, and especially to office holders. Finally, on 2 January 1650, the Rump decided that all men over the age of 18 would take an Engagement, of the form I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords

Holidays and festivals were traditional occasions when the young men of early modern London indulged in carnivals of misrule. One of the most striking examples of these were the ritualized attacks on brothels by apprentices, which customarily took place on Shrove Tuesday. These rituals, which often involved quite extensive destruction to property, seem to have occurred with persistent regularity, at least in the early Stuart period, there being twenty-four known Shrove Tuesday riots in the thirty-five years between 1606 and 1641. Such activities normally received moderate handling from the authorities, and only in exceptional circumstances did the courts choose to punish the rioters with heavy fines or a period of imprisonment. Contemporaries, it seems, were familiar with, and to a certain extent tolerant of this ‘ancient administration of justice at Shrovetide’ by the apprentices, as James Harrington called it. Such feats were even acclaimed in popular literature as being a sign of the virtue of London's young men. In this context, the response of the authorities to apprentice attacks on bawdy houses that occurred in Easter week of 1668 seems excessive. Here, fifteen of the ringleaders were tried for high treason, on a rather dubious interpretation of the law, and four were eventually hanged, drawn and quartered.

In the 1960s Professor Plumb discussed The growth of political stability in England 1675–1725. In the seventeenth century, he noted, party violence and political conflict were frequent events, resulting in open civil war in the 1640s and several perilous crises in later years. Stability (he argued) developed from the 1720s by means of the ubiquitous use of political patronage by the Whig government, and Sir Robert Walpole's judicious ability to avoid too many controversies that stirred political passions. The government simply offered too many tempting jobs and places for any but the staunchest tory to resist. At the same time, elections became more expensive and less frequent, so a parliamentary seat was a long-term investment for a wealthy family. Of course, this account has been challenged. The tory opposition continued to exist, and to develop creative new methods of organization and propaganda. However, Britain clearly had a much more stable and secure political system in the eighteenth century.

During the past quarter century scholars from several disciplines have established the central metaphorical function of the demise of the ancient Roman Republic for both literary and political discourse in eighteenth century Britain. But the reverse side of that inquiry – the impact of the analogy between Britain and Rome on the modern historical interpretation of the ancient republic – has received virtually no attention. This oversight has concealed a remarkable modern British historiographical phenomenon that did not end at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather, for over two hundred years modern British political ideologies and preoccupations determined not only how the collapse of the Roman republic would be interpreted but also in large measure even whether it would receive historical examination. The various shifts of historical interpretation from the age of Queen Anne through that of Chamberlain illustrate with stunning and disturbing clarity the relentless manner in which contemporary political concerns can shape, revise, and eventually overwhelm modes of historical understanding without discovery of significant new evidence or the application of new methodology. By the twentieth century methodology itself, in the form of prosopography, in part served the ends of political commentary.

In attempting to explain the stability of eighteenth-century Britain, and in particular the maintenance of political, social and economic supremacy by the landed aristocracy, scholars have begun to pay attention to the role of ideology and opinion. They see this not merely as providing an explanation of the way things were, but justifying and reinforcing them. The dominant ideological interpretation of society had emerged from the political and constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, and in particular from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an interpretation which might be denominated ‘Whig’, and which faced its most serious challenge at the very end of the eighteenth century from the French revolution. Despite the more tangible threat of French arms, the ruling classes in Britain did not underestimate the danger to social order from the arguments advanced by adherents of the rights-of-man doctrine propagated by the revolutionaries. If, in reply to these views, the status quo could be shown not only to be necessary and inevitable, but also right and good, that is to say correspondent with the true nature of man, then the morality of the existing practices and institutions of civil society would be proven. The problem at its most fundamental level was ethical, and it was a problem which conservatives attempted to solve in a variety of ways.

‘Anybody who has bred horses will tell you’, the anti-feminist M.P. Major Falle informed M.P.s in 1923, when opposing women's full admission to Cambridge University, ‘that it is folly in the extreme to put colts and fillies together’. More subtle was the argument of Lord Hugh Cecil; concerned with what we now call the ‘chemistry’ of human relationships, he claimed that only a single-sex environment produces the ‘nervous intensity’ that launches major intellectual achievement and significant shifts in national opinion. Anti-feminist faith in segregation applied also to politics. Before 1918, parliament was what social anthropologists would now call a ‘men's house’ as with the kindred London clubs and colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, women's admission to it was slow and reluctant. If women wanted to participate in public life, it was argued, they should form clubs or parliaments of their own. Unlike some anti-feminists, Cecil's desire for segregation did not lead him to oppose votes for women because he saw the elector as simply an individual in a polling-booth, but he shared the anti-feminists' idea that the M.P. ‘resembles the limb of a body’, and so should be recruited solely from men. Nobody listened; within months of getting the vote, women (even unenfranchised women between 21 and 30) became eligible for parliament, and mixed universities eventually became the norm.

Like other advanced countries in the twentieth century, Britain has witnessed a remarkable expansion in the size and functions of government. Increasing public intervention has necessarily been accompanied by a vigorous expansion in the number of specialists and professionals employed in the public service. In recent times there has been increasing academic interest in the role of one particular category of specialist, the economist. We have the definitive account by Howson and Winch of the economic advisory council and its committee on economic information, the purely advisory bodies of academic economists and representatives of producer interest groups which encouraged officials and ministers to take a longer, broader look at trends in the national and international economies in the thirties. From the post-1945 period we have a number of studies of specific departments and a growing collection of memoirs written by disenchanted or self-justifying economists on leaving government service. For the crucial period of the second world war, however, when administrators and politicians seemed to accept the need for professional economic advice from within the bureaucracy, comparatively little systematic research has been undertaken. There are memoirs, but many have been written long after the event and tend to be discursive and occasionally unreliable as to detail. Fortunately the state papers relating to the war are available and should be a reliable source from which to make judgements about the work and effectiveness of economic advisers in this crucial period.

Almost forty years have passed since the UN mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, was assassinated in Jerusalem on 17 September, 1948 by the ‘Freedom Fighters of Israel’ (Lohamei Herut Yisrael. Hebrew acronym: LEHY), the smallest and most extreme of the three military organizations of the Yishuv (as the Jewish community in Palestine was called before the state of Israel came into being). The announcement made after the assassination was issued by ‘The Fatherland Front’ (Hazit ha-Moledet), a ‘front’ brought into being for the purpose by LEHY and which disappeared immediately afterwards. It declared that Bernadotte had been ‘an obvious agent of the British enemy’. Now that the British and American documents have been made available, this serious allegation can be examined, and as a result it can now safely be affirmed that the mediator acted in complete independence. He had no contact whatsover with British or American diplomacy over the political proposals that sealed his fate. These proposals he presented in his first Report on 28 June 1948.