On the eve of the Henrician Reformation, the law of treason was markedly less well developed than one might suppose. Over a century of dynastic war, party violence, and the vigorous extermination of opponents had left strikingly little deposit in the law which was still essentially defined by the famous act of 1352, the first, and to this day the basic, treason statute. Minor attempts to vary the law may here be ignored, and the only serious alteration—the act of 1397 which omitted the demand for an ‘overt deed’—was repealed in 1399. The reasons for what might at first sight seem a surprising reluctance to extend the grasp of the treason law are not obscure. For one thing, most of the so-called traitors of the later fifteenth century were men who had had the misfortune to fight on the losing side in a civil war. Their treason grew out of the see-saw of politics and was committed in open war. They were therefore commonly amenable (if not already killed in battle) to the summary procedure of treason trials under the law of arms and did not come within the purview of the law of England at all. This method of dealing with the vanquished had one disadvantage: conviction by a constable's or marshal's court did not involve forfeiture of lands. The Crown therefore had recourse to the authority of the high court of parliament, and acts of attainder followed each turn of the wheel in the civil wars.

‘Wee can neither Swear a new Allegiance nor Transfer ye Old; nor Assist at any Coronation while K.[ing] James the second Liue's. In these few words penned on 17 February 1689, within days of the proclamation of William and Mary, Bishop Turner of Ely scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of the loyalists’ dilemma. The unexpected manner in which the Revolution had been accomplished entailed upon churchmen a deep and bitter conflict of loyalties. Certainly none were more afflicted than the Cavalier politicians, prelates and magnates of the Church of England party, who less than a decade before had drawn together in defence of the lawful succession, the established religion and the privileges of the governing classes. As one might suspect, the re-emergence of the Cavalier leaders in the autumn of 1688, from the isolation into which they had been ungenerously thrown by the King's espousal of Indulgence, had important repercussions on events following James's abandonment of government. Yet, while contemporary attitudes to civil obedience have received close study, curiously little attention has been given to the role of James's supporters in the practical politics of the crisis, especially in its initial stages.

In order to understand why Tsar Peter and King Augustus II of Poland fell into one another's arms when they met at Rawa in August 1698, and why they parted such bosom friends, we must first of all briefly consider the relations between Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Sweden in the last three or four decades of the seventeenth century. After the peace of Oliva with Poland in 1661 and that of Kardis with Russia in 1669, Sweden's possession of Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and Karelia debarred both the Polish Republic and the tsar from the Baltic, thereby furnishing them with a common grievance and object of envy. Sweden's granary and her bulwark against Russia and Poland, Livonia with the port of Riga— ‘the most valuable jewel of the crown of Sweden’ — was a particularly invidious token of predominance in the Baltic and one whose lustre still outshone the growing importance of Narva in Estonia.

DESPITE the vast influence and patronage at his disposal, Sir Robert Walpole was compelled, on occasion, to pursue a course of action which he heartily disliked. At the time of the excise crisis in 1733, the First Minister was forced to revise his policies by pressure, not only from the opposition, but also from the radicals within the ministerial camp. The radical group, usually known as the ‘Old Whigs’, suddenly found themselves in a position to play a decisive role in parliamentary politics for the first time in more than a decade.

Until about fifteen years ago, most modern scholars saw Edmund Burke's thought largely as a reaction to the philosophical and political rationalism of his time: to them, although Burke was reactive, his revolt was original. When scholars did seek the historical ‘origin’ of his thought, it was generally found in Whiggery and that convenient catch-all ‘the’ British tradition of empiricist philosophizing. Of late, two groups of scholars have sought and found other ‘origins’: the first group, larger and perhaps better-known, finds Burke's thought to be rooted in the principles of ‘the’ natural law and, perhaps, also in the dictates of scholastic prudence; the other group, tiny and less well known, finds in Burke's traditionalism a partial continuation of the traditional way of thinking of seventeenth-century common lawyers. One consequence of undertaking this disinterment of Burke's ‘origins’ has been the burial of Burke's originality.

One of the most serious problems facing Archbishop Laud was the rapid growth of the Lecturer Movement during the 1620s and 1630s. The increasing numbers of graduates available, and the increasing amount of money donated to support them meant that the weekly lectures had become one of the chief “religious … organizations of the opposition”, and were beginning to “undermine the hierarchical principle”. The gravity of the situation was marked by the increasingly stringent regulation of the lecturers. They had originally been allowed to preach with very little control, but from the Canons of 1604 onwards they were made the subject of several new regulations. These culminated in the Directions of March 16296 which, although issued by Archbishop Abbot, were based upon suggestions made by Laud to the king. Soon afterwards the lecturers in London Diocese were curtailed as a prelude to Laud's future work as archbishop. The Directions were reissued in January 1634, and a policy of deliberately reducing certain kinds of lecturer was initiated in several dioceses, pursued in the Metropolitical Visitation, and completed by Laud's supporters amongst the bishops.

The influence of British Indian example on the Irish Land Act of 1870 has received some notice in recent years. Dr E. E. Stokes, for one, has commented that it was men with an Indian background like J. S. Mill and George Campbell who educated the Liberal party to think ‘that the State might justly lay hands on the sacred institution of private landed property’. It is argued here that the general influence was very much less than has been suggested. Nor did Indian example point to a single course of action by the state on the Irish problem. Mill and Campbell, the two leading advocates of Irish land reform to draw on India, put forward solutions which, if intended to secure practically the same end, differed significantly in their approach.

In recent years a good deal of attention has been paid to the fall of Robert Harley in 1708.1 The purpose of the present essay is to examine the other side of the coin—Harley's appointment in 1704. This latter problem is not simply a more neglected theme. It is also more important. In the main the various studies of the Secretary's resignation have concerned themselves with the immediate occasion of his fall. The roots of the trouble—the longstanding difference between Harley and the Churchill group over Junto pressure—have not been in question. Harley's admission to Cabinet rank on the other hand poses problems on a grander scale. The reputation of key political figures is involved. So too is the entire profile of ministerial history in the first half-dozen years of Queen Anne's reign. Indeed one might even suggest that Harley's appointment has more than a little to tell us about that hoariest of problems, the Whig Interpretation of History.

Although retrenchment, with its overtones of efficiency and its implied attack on corruption, is a familiar watchword of modern politics, it is difficult today to appreciate the deep ethical and constitutional significance of the issue of economy during the early nineteenth century, or the strong hold which the concept exerted over the attitudes and actions of British politicians and administrators in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty-three years of costly war with France had increased Britain's national debt from £228 million in 1793 to £876 million in 1815, and the laborious process of eliminating this deficit at the rate of a few millions a year by means of a sinking fund was aptly described as ‘the attempt of a wooden-legged man to catch a hare’. The propertied classes in the post-war period considered themselves excessively burdened with taxation, and until the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had been effectively put into operation, they were also called upon to meet the costs of an expensive and inefficient system of poor relief.

The remarkable gains made by the Conservatives in the general election of December 1868 in Lancashire have lately been widely recognized. Their extent may have suggested to some, either that there was a general movement of opinion in the area towards the Conservatives between the general election of 1865 and that of 1868, or that the newly enfranchised electors were more favourable to the Conservatives than the old constituency had been, or that some combination of the two elements was at work. It is the purpose of this article to ascertain what grounds exist for these explanations.

Historians of the ‘Age of Reform’ have sometimes been tempted into the fallacy castigated long ago by Herbert Butterfield; they busy themselves ‘with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress’ and forget ‘with what wilfulness and waste [progress] twists and turns”. Often, by implication, they exaggerate the stupidity and selfishness of the reactionaries while overestimating the enlightenment of the reformers and understressing their faddishness, their lack of scruple, and their divided aims or methods; it thus becomes difficult to see why reforming causes were ever resisted. In this sense, nineteenth-century England has received too few ‘Tory historians’ not too many; though with Professor Gash's well-known defence of Tories misguided enough to oppose franchise reform in 1831–2, and with the recent reinstatement of mid-Victorian working men shortsighted enough to vote Liberal there are signs that the reaction against Whiggish historiography of the nineteenth century has already begun.

Although there have been recently critical studies on the social forces initiating both the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 in France, they have been concerned with the question of defining the ‘bourgeoisie’ or of estimating the role played by the problem by examining the origin of the idea in the political and social theories of that time to show and why the phrase ‘bourgeois revolution’ was used, and to see whether the concept is any longer of use in terms of historical analysis.

One of the standard points mentioned in discussions of the failure of Chartism is that it did not gain any strong support in London. The capital city, with a considerable part of the total population of the country, was very largely apathetic to Chartism, although we have little knowledge beyond this generalization. This contrasts strangely with the attitude of other capital cities during revolutionary movements (since Chartism, in the existing political atmosphere, had to have incipient revolution written into its programme if it were to succeed); Paris obviously played the formative part in 1789, as did St Petersburg in 1917, while most other European radical movements found considerable support among the discontented elements in capital cities. That Chartism did not gain similar success in London was of considerable importance for the movement since, although opposition to the six points was strong in the legislature, a mass following in the capital would have furthered the chances of the Chartists.

The unity of the Unionist party had been destroyed by Joseph Chamberlain's momentous speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, a speech described by one of his disciples as ‘a challenge to free thought as direct and provocative as the theses which Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenberg’. It was a particularly apt simile. Chamberlain's speech demanded a new Reformation and men soon found themselves ‘hating Free Trade with all the intensity with which any Calvinist ever hated the Church of Rome’.

It has become a tradition to portray Transvaal history as a struggle between Boer nationalism and international capitalism, from the beginnings of large-scale gold mining in the 1880s until the electoral victory of General Botha and Het Volk in 1907. J. A. Hobson, writing in 1899–1900, predicted that after—as before—the South African War, the Imperial Government would have to face the dilemma of choosing between ‘an oligarchy of financial Jews, and the restoration of Boer domination’, since there was no other basis of political power. In his analysis of Transvaal white politics, he admitted that some gold-mining companies (the J. B. Robinson group, Barnato's and sometimes the companies of Albu and Goertz) were hostile to the influence of larger companies (Eckstein's and Consolidated Gold Fields), but denied that this affected the monolithic nature of international capitalism in the Transvaal. Later writers on the period, who have rejected almost everything that Hobson wrote, have nevertheless endorsed his interpretation. The Boer leaders were understandably happy to approve of such an analysis, since it placed them in a flattering light as the only realistic salvation for a magnate-dominated society. General Botha, for example, ardently courted the white working men on the Rand after the War, stressing the identity of material interests between farmers and artisans, in the face of the capitalist threat. General Smuts presented a more subtle and persuasive version of the argument, when attempting to persuade the Colonial Office to grant responsible government to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony.

The consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny brought with it a more closely defined honorific hierarchy. From the first investiture at Windsor in 1861 of the Star of India and increasingly agter the assumption by the Queen of her new title of Empress, high service came to be rewarded in honours and distinctions with a discriminating lavishness reminiscent of the creations of the Younger Pitt. But the title assumed by the Queen and announced on 28 April 1876 had not originally been designed for India alone. It was Disraeli's caution that induced the Queen to abandon the style of ‘Empress of Great Britain, Ireland and India’. In his anxiety to avoid controversy many assurances were given that the United Kingdom would not be affected. Thus limitation of the title to India did not at first have any special significance. In reply to Lowe's criticisms, the Prime Minister saw no reason why two of the Queen's sons should not become Dukes of Canada and Australia. It was only in the course of the preparations for proclaiming the title on the first day of 1877 that the Indian Government, recovered from its surprise, suggested that the occasion might be invested with a political as well as a symbolic significance. The Viceroy, Lytton, came to believe that the occasion was a unique opportunity, not merely for broadening the base of the imperial Government through a popular symbol, but for materially strengthening the executive by a new understanding with the native princes of India.

Before 1914 one of the methods often suggested as a solution of the Home Rule problem and the more general one of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom was ‘Home Rule all round’, known also as ‘Devolution’ or ‘Federalism’ dependent on the occasion or the party affiliation of the would-be reformer. The concept was by no means a new one; it had been broached as early as the 1830s and had received much attention in the eighties and nineties at the time of Gladstone's two Home Rule bills. At best it meant the erection of four provincial Parliaments with separate executives for Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, responsible for essentially local matters, and an overall Parliament sitting in London, elected on a population basis, responsible for general United Kingdom affairs such as postal services, customs, trade, defence and foreign policy; at the very least the scheme meant the devolution onto local government bodies, possibly provincial councils, of many of the more parochial problems considered at Westminster. ‘Home Rule all round’ attracted considerable interest in 1910 at the time of the Constitutional Conference and again during the tempestuous months of 1913–14 when the United Kingdom hovered on the brink of civil war and any and all compromise solutions were of necessity being explored. The role played by the Round Table Movement in these proposals and subsequent manoeuvres has only partially been recognized.

Ernst Nolte in his Die Epoche des Faschismus writes that Hitler undoubtedly in principle had wanted war ‘but hardly that war at that time’, meaning the war of 1939. This somewhat muddled thesis conceals two distinct issues, namely the argument that in 1939 contingencies were not entirely to Hitler's liking and the argument that in 1939 contingencies were so little to his liking that we must conclude that Hitler took no conscious steps to risk a general war.

When, on 16 October 1925, the leading European statesmen initialled the famous Locarno agreements, a new era of international tranquillity and peace appeared to have dawned. The British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, carried away by euphoria, wrote of ‘feeling like a little child again in spirit’ and of having ‘lived such days and celebrated such a birthday as it is given to no man to experience twice’. In reality, however, the agreements were built on inadequate foundations. As Viscount Cecil of Chelwood foresaw, limited regional security guarantees were an unsatisfactory substitute for the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance (1923) and the Geneva Protocol (1924), whose rejection by successive British Governments had spelt the end of hopes that wider collective security provisions and measures of disarmament might be achieved simultaneously. The Locarno agreements were only finally torn up in March 1936 when Adolf Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland; but the spirit which underlay them began to evaporate from the day of their signature. In this essay attention is given only to the first post-Locarno crisis, which was in itself sufficient to disillusion many optimists and to reveal that Franco-German tension was still a potent force in European relations. This crisis arose out of Germany's decision, in part fulfilment of her obligations under the agreements, to apply for membership of the League of Nations.