The assumption by Henry VIII of an effective supremacy over the English church and the enforcement of the legislation which accompanied it has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet, though the main themes of the story are clear, the obstacles which the central government met in the dioceses of England, and the way in which policy emerged as a response to them, has not been examined so meticulously. The problems confronting the government in 1534 are obvious enough: the bishops, as well as many others, who had been brought up in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, and who had administered the affairs of church or state in the period before the divorce, were left in a state of suspense in 1534. What tangible effect would the royal supremacy have? If it was to bring in a new order, what would that order be? And what part should bishop, priest or layman take in promoting or hindering it? For the bishops who had obtained their sees by papal bull before 1534, the dilemmas posed in the years to come were great. For Fisher of Rochester, the way forward was to the scaffold. Others, like Warham of Canterbury, Sher-burne of Chichester, Nix of Norwich, West of Ely, Blythe of Lichfield and Coventry, died during the crucial period 1533–8, thereby making room for those who had not been bishops before the assumption of the supremacy. But, for a small group of bishops, there was no escaping the problems of comparison which these years brought. Between 1534 and 1538, the translation of the royal supremacy into a practical reality in the dioceses and parishes of England was attempted.

The attempt to identify a ‘general crisis of the seventeenth century’ has not perhaps involved sufficient attention to ecclesiastical history. Yet isolated remarks have already revealed historians' appreciation of religious phenomena common to England and to the continent, to Protestant as well as to Catholic Europe. The application to Laudian England of the concept of ‘Puritanism of the Right’ has not failed to suggest a comparable view of some aspects at least of the European Counter-Reformation. A common interest has been detected between Venetian erastianism and Dutch Counter-Remonstrant Calvinism.

Mary Tudor's ecclesiastical policy is highly vulnerable to the criticism that it was negative and lacked a sense of direction. She seems to have reserved her efforts for the repeal of schismatic legislation and the burning of obstinate heretics. It is therefore easy to agree with those who see little positive zeal or spiritual content in the Marian Church —‘arid legalism’ is one recent verdict. And this condemnation includes Reginald Pole. He received extensive legatine powers from the Pope, enjoyed a wide reputation as a reforming Cardinal, and was trusted by Mary as her kinsman and adviser; we should therefore expect him to have employed in England all the available weapons of the Roman Church for an attack on heresy. Yet, in Professor Dickens' words, Pole and Mary ‘ failed to discover the Counter-Reformation ’.2 It is the intention of this article to examine the priorities which Pole followed in his plans for the Marian Church, and to investigate whether his legalistic approach and his rejection of the positive methods of the Counter-Reformation were the result of inefficiency or were based on a considered, though possibly mistaken, long-term policy.

‘Attainder’, A. F. Pollard once wrote, was ‘the characteristic instrument of Tudor policy’, and ‘acts of attainder [the’ favourite weapon’ of Henry VIII. Unfortunately Pollard did little more than throw out these striking phrases; he never made a systematic study of parliamentary attainder under die second Tudor. The use of attainder in die fifteenth century has been subjected to recent scholarly scrutiny, and certain bills from die period of Thomas Cromwell's ascendancy have been discussed by Professor Elton. But a careful examination of attainder under Henry VIII is still lacking. Since his reign marks die heyday of attainder by statute, such an inquiry is clearly important.

‘Since I have ascended the throne, and wear the first diadem in the world, I have made philosophy the legislator of my empire.’ Of all the sayings attributed to the Emperor Joseph II, this is easily the most hackneyed. It figures in many surveys of eighteenth-century history, whether old like W. O. Hassall's and A. H. Johnson's or new like those by Stuart Andrews, Maurice Ashley, R. W. Harris and E. N. Williams; in what is regarded as the best biography of Joseph in German, by Viktor Bibl; in the most extended and best known Life in English, Saul K. Padover's The Revolutionary Emperor; in Herbert H. Rowen's collection of documents, From Absolutism to Revolution; in Albert Sorel's L'Europe et la Révolution française; in Victor-L. Tapié's The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy; and in the recent monograph by Walter W. Davis, Joseph II: An Imperial Reformer for the Austrian Netherlands. The remark is the first sentence of a letter which the emperor is supposed to have written to Cardinal Herzan, his minister in Rome, in October 1781, and which goes on:

The preservation and the consolidation of international peace was the general aim of Emperor Alexander I of Russia in the first year of his reign. The young autocrat, faced with the novelty of international politics and bent on domestic reform, hoped for good relations with all the powers and tried to avoid any serious entanglement in European affairs. Diplomatic relations with Great Britain, which had been severed by the unstable Emperor Paul, were restored in June 1801, and a treaty of friendship was signed with the French Republic in October of the same year. Alexander expressed his readiness to co-operate with Bonaparte, whom he at first much admired, in arranging a general continental pacification and in settling the indemnities for the German princes dispossessed by France's expansion to the Rhine. The only issue that could have marred Franco-Russian relations at die time was Alexander's concern that full inde- pendence be restored to Piedmont and Naples. Nevertheless, the appointment of V. P. Kochubey, an advocate of a passive foreign policy, as head of the College for Foreign Affairs in October 1801, confirmed Alexander's pacific intentions. Yet widun four years Russia was to find herself at war with France as a leading and zealous promoter of a wide European coalition and the champion of a new European order.

Writers on Leibniz have frequently stressed the marked contrast in character between his metaphysics and his political theory. As a metaphysician Leibniz appears as a thinker of daring originality whose views have sometimes seemed to set up certain tensions with orthodox Christian teaching. In the field of political theory, however, we encounter a much more traditional and conservative figure. Writing in a post-Hobbesian period Leibniz is a determined opponent of any trend towards a secular analysis of political questions; yet, within a framework of conventional theological assumptions, he is quite as insistent as Hobbes that obligation is co-extensive with the ruler's ability to provide protection. In a large measure the conservatism of Leibniz's political views can be explained by reference to die external facts of his position. Occupying a semi-official post at the court of Hanover, Leibniz was dependent on the favour of his electoral patrons; his political writings tended to be occasional pieces composed with a view to promoting specific Hanoverian interests. Leibniz's experience of politics was thus confined to the world of a minor German court, and die narrowness of diis background placed him at a severe disadvantage for understanding the political debates of a country like England with quite different traditions.

It has been argued that the general election of 1852 marked the zenith of clerical influence in Irish politics in the nineteenth century. If so, it marked a barren use of power. The present paper is concerned with how such influence was acquired and why it was so curiously exercised; or, more precisely, with these questions in so far as the catholic hierarchy was concerned.

The Eastern Question is a hardy perennial in historical research and writing. Years, indeed generations, of study seem to leave basic issues unresolved. One of the most persistent of those issues is the role of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British ambassador at Constantinople, in the outbreak of the Crimean War. Temperley may have been exaggerating when he said it had long been a popular belief that Stratford ‘was the human agency which caused the Crimean War’ – a belief he spent some time in efforts to dispel – but that Stratford was less than helpful in the pursuit of a peaceful solution to the 1853 crisis was certainly a widely held belief at the time and has proved an enduring one. As late as 1966, M. S. Anderson, dealing with the question of Stratford's ‘guilt’, once more could only conclude: ‘Whether Stratford de Redcliffe, as has often been alleged, privately urged the Turkish ministers to reject the [Vienna] Note while publicly advising them to accept it, is uncertain.’ The Vienna Note was the settlement of the Russo-Turkish conflict proposed jointly by the Governments of England, France, Austria and Prussia and accepted in toto by the Tsar. There was, however, no lack of certainty in the minds of the British foreign secretary at the time, Lord Clarendon, and the first lord of the admiralty, Sir James Graham, that Stratford had been an agent provocateur. On 3 September Greville wrote: ‘Clarendon thinks that Stratford has encouraged the resistance of the Divan to the proposals [at Vienna] and that he might have persuaded the Turks to accept the terms if he had chosen to do so…’

The thirty years during which James Perry owned and edited the Morning Chronicle, the leading Whig daily newspaper, were marked by important developments in the history of the press. In the early nineteenth century there was a notable growth in the spirit of political independence among newspaper proprietors, and they developed the classical liberal roles of the press: die impartial dissemination of news and the expression of public opinion. Professional editors and reporters came to replace the old all-rounders like William Woodfall who had combined the tasks of printing, editing and reporting; and individual proprietors supplanted the unenterprising ownership of syndicates. There was a rapid expansion in the number of daily evening and of Sunday papers and, though the number of daily morning papers remained fairly stable, dieir circulation increased steadily after about 1800. A well-conducted newspaper could serve, not simply as a side-product of a printer's or bookseller's business, or as an advertising medium for its proprietors' interests, but as a lucrative business venture in its own right. There was an extraordinary rise in the capital value of successful newspapers: the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, which were bought for a few hundred pounds each in die 1790s, were sold for £42,000 and £25,000 respectively in the early nineteenth century. Despite the heavy weight of taxation, which was successfully designed to restrict the sale of newspapers, proprietors were able to prosper thanks to die increasing profits diey made on advertisements. It has now been possible to calculate, from the ledgers of die Public Advertiser and Gazetteer, and from the office copies of the Morning Chronicle, some part of a newspaper's profits from advertising in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The brief ministerial crisis of June 1844, precipitated by the defeat in the House of Commons of the government's proposals for the temporary adjustment of the duties on imported sugar, and resolved when Sir Robert Peel secured from the House what amounted to a reversal of the decision, has been scrutinized by two historians in recent years. In his earlier work, Dr Stewart cites with approval contemporary observations to the effect that Peel's authority was severely shaken by the affair, and remarks that ‘by 1844 the Tory, nationalist wing of Peel's party was beginning to unite in resistance to the progressive tendency of Peel's government. In 1844 they gave Peel a warning of what they might do.’ His second assessment is more emphatic. He interprets Conservative disaffection on the sugar issue, and on the factory bill three months earlier, as the ‘first challenge to Peel's leadership’, and argues that it revealed that ‘Peel's hold over a large section of his party was at an end, destroyed by his own methods’.

John Morley, a son of Blackburn, wrote of the Lancashire of the 1860s; ‘as a rule in the cotton districts where the trade relations between master and man have been … established on a satisfactory basis, the man, in the truly feudal spirit, takes part with his master, and wears his political colour. This current of things … “esprit de corps” interesting the employed in the triumph of this mill over that, is not likely to change immediately nor for a long while to come’.

During the first half of the French Third Republic, before 1914, certain regions of France established themselves as ‘red’, areas where the extreme left of the political spectrum could rely on strong and regular popular support. One of the outstanding features of this geographical ‘partition’ of French politics was the extent to which the ‘red’ areas were located in the countryside, notably in the departments of small peasant property in the south. Radicals, socialists and latterly communists have all benefited from this fact of French political life, consistently carrying at elections departments such as the Creuse, the Haute Vienne, the Allier, Gard, etc. Contemporaries and historians alike have observed this phenomenon with some surprise, and we are now witnessing a concerted effort by French historians and political scientists to find convincing explanations for it. This article is intended as a contribution to the continuing debate.

In the provincial cities the existence of protected estates like the Calthorpe Estate, which owned and managed Edgbaston in Birmingham, had a strategic influence on the whole development of the city. The owners of such estates, served by solicitors, and themselves serving as patrons of urban parishes, governors of grammar schools and presidents of charitable associations, often provided the backbone of a ‘conservative interest’ in cities whose flavour was essentially radical (Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 38).

That Magdalene College should commemorate the centenary of a celebrated son is generous, in two ways. First, because modern England owes a felt debt to Newman, whether it is to Cardinal Newman or only Mr Newman; and since the quarrel between Kingsley and Newman still reverberates out of the Victorian age like the quarrel between Wilberforce and Huxley, anyone who feels any kind of debt to Newman is bound to have less than the highest natural sympathy for Kingsley. The second reason is that Kingsley's attitude to his own college was at one time so tense with contempt, and diis contempt expressed publicly, and read in all the middle-class homes of England, that the contemporary fellows of the college might be pardoned for being tepid when in i860 he came back to Cambridge as a don.

Not much is generally known about the career of Sir George Sydenham Clarke as first secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence other than his arrival at Whitehall in 1904 and his departure under something of a cloud three years later. Yet Clarke's career is in many respects worthy of study. He can lay strong claim to being the first defence ‘bureaucrat’, and as such his career served to establish a pattern into which his successors had to fit themselves. His activities during his three years of office do much to illuminate the methods by which strategic decisions were reached and demonstrate the obstructions that beset the professional civil servant in such a milieu. The influence of the committee which he served has been the subject of considerable analysis and comment; Clarke's personal disposition helps to explain die remark of one scholar that, for a body occupying its influential position, the CID achieved relatively little.1 Finally, the manner of Clarke's going illustrates the political strength of the navalist lobby and of Sir John Fisher at a crucial time in the making of defence policy.

In the House of Commons on 23 May 1892, following a speech by Joseph Chamberlain in qualified support of Balfour's Irish Local Government Bill, Tim Healy assailed ‘our Birmingham Diogenes’ with considerable warmth for the manner in which such support was habitually rendered:

What happens is this. The Government bring in a Bill. Its proposals are attacked, and the Government gets into distress, and then of course ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’. The Rt.hon.Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham gets up and makes a speech. I have heard him make a speech on the Coercion Bill of 1887 in almost identical terms, and also on the Parnell Commission Bill of 1888.

In 1882, when Dicey's so-called age of ‘Individualism’ was over and the high tide of laissez-faire was receding, there emerged for die first time in Britain a thoroughly dogmatic pressure group for extreme laissez-faire. This was the Liberty and Property Defence League. The League originated as part of what Beatrice Webb described as the ‘reaction against empirical socialism [which] came to a head under Mr Gladstone's administration of 1880–85’. But it out lasted Gladstone's second government and defended laissez-faire widi some effect until the end of the century.

In his volume in the Oxford History of England, R. C. K. Ensor gave us the first scholarly and dispassionate account of the reforms which Edward Cardwell made in the British army between 1868 and 1874. Ensor consciously followed Gladstone, who called Cardwell the greatest war secretary since die era of die Napoleonic wars. Ever since Ensor wrote, it has been impossible to do what Fortescue, the army's historian, did when he wrote whole chapters on the army after the Crimean War without once mentioning the name of Cardwell. Among more recent scholars diere has been a good deal of writing around the subject of the Cardwell reforms widiout actually attacking them head-on. We have a brief biography of Cardwell which quotes at some length from his correspondence, and we have a description of the purchase system in the army. There have been studies of a part of the background of the Cardwell era, and of die working-out of the reforms in the army of the 1870s and 1880s. Two recent works have been rather critical of the value of Cardwell's work.