Robert Woodford was an obscure man, the steward of Northampton from 1636 until his death in 1654, whose diary, which covers the period 1637 until 1641, tells us much about how provincial men viewed the growing political crisis which was to culminate in civil war. There are very few sources available from which to assemble a biography of the diarist. He warrants no article in Dictionary of national biography, he is not recorded as having attended either university, nor to have registered at any of the inns of court. In a brief biography, his eldest son Samuel stated that his father was born in 1606, the son of a gentleman, Robert Woodford of Old in Northamptonshire, that ‘he had but Ordinary Education’, and that his ‘meane Fortune’ meant that ‘he could never provide for us in Lands or Money’. He married Hannah, daughter of Robert Hancs, citizen of London, in 1635 at the church of Allhallows-in-the-Wall. The minute book of the Northampton Town Assembly furnishes us with a few brief details of his career as a provincial legal practitioner. In 1636, he was elected steward of the town of Northampton by the good offices of his patron John Reading, the outgoing steward, who relinquished the office in his favour. The climax of his career would seem to have been his appointment as under-sheriff of the county in 1653 until his death in 1654: he remained a provincial lawyer.

Of the many books written by the late Herbert Butterfield, the most influential by far was The whig interpretation of history. The importance of that essay is not just that it attained the status of a classic in Butterfield's own lifetime, and has continued to be reprinted for over fifty years. Its main significance is that the historical profession in Britain came to accept its polemical terminology. The phrase ‘whig history’ has long been used as a term of historiographical criticism, in such a way as to imply, firstly, that everyone knows what it means, and secondly, that nobody wants to be ‘whiggish’. This usage is much in accordance with Butterfield's intentions: he succeeded in implanting the term in the professional language of historians.

‘You ask me what a Lit de justice is? I will tell you!’ Thus exclaimed Louis-Adrien Le Paige, an eighteenth-century parlementaire who was excoriating the current spectacle of the king's appearance in person in the Grand-Chambre of the Parlement of Paris. Denied their ancient and customary rights of consultation and deliberation in important affairs of state, which in their view meant an active or participatory role in the legislative process, magistrates like Le Paige felt coerced in 1756 into the passive role of registering policies presented to them as faits accomplis. And thus also opens Professor Sarah Hanley's penetrating and revisionist study of this complex ceremony where monarch and magistrates met together in the legislative arena: the lit de justice. In a tour de force of painstaking scholarship Professor Hanley has convincingly proved that this ceremony, in which the king personally appeared in Parlement and sat on a specially decorated ‘seat of justice’, had evolved out of legend and myth. The lit de justice did not, as generations of parlementaires like Le Paige had claimed, emerge in the middle ages shortly after the creation of the court itself in the late thirteenth century. As Professor Hanley shows, the first such ceremony did not occur until much later, in the reign of Francis I in 1527. More importantly, she demonstrates that at its inception the lit de justice was not associated in any way with the adversarial scene depicted by Le Paige in 1756, with the king forcing his will on a recalcitrant court by making a personal appearance in the Grand-Chambre in order to force the registration of unpopular legislation.

In a previous article, we examined Herbert Butterfield's identification of a certain pattern of anachronism in historical writing, in his classic book The whig interpretation of history (1931). In the decades since that book was originally published, Butterfield's designation has been extended far beyond its original domain of political and religious history. The terms ‘whig history’ and ‘whiggish history’ have passed into the common parlance of historians. This very success, however, has masked a failure to define the nature of such anachronistic writing, its causes and remedies. Such definition is all the more necessary since Butterfield's own attempts were clearly inadequate. Building upon and amending certain tentative formulations of Butterfield's, we defined the root of the anachronistic error as present-centredness: that is, that the historian, in seeking to study, reconstruct and write about the past, is constrained by necessarily starting from the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present.

On the morning of Wednesday, 24 February 1585, a bill ‘for imploying of Landes and Tenementes given to the Maintenance of Highewayes, Bridges etc.’ was read in the house of common for the seond time and committed for consideration by several members that afternoon in the hall of the Middle Temple. The committee decided to introduce a completely new measure which was itself committed after the second reading on 9 March. At one point in these proceedings William Fleetwood, recorder of London, told the lower house that he had advised the bill's promoter to make it ‘a private bill but he would not and therfor he shall see what will come of it’. Undoubtedly irked at this refusal to accept his advice, Fleetwood may have felt some satisfaction when the bill was rejected on its third reading in the lower house. Nevertheless, the bill's promoter had good reason to introduce his measure as a public rather than as a private bill. Private bills were expensive. Fees were payable at every stage, for the reading, committing, engrossing and endorsing such bills, and then, if all went well, fees had to be paid if the promoter wanted the bill printed and thus made public. Besides the cost, private bills stood less chance of getting through both houses of parliament. Not only was there a great risk of one's measure getting swamped by the large number of private bills always introduced in the first few weeks of a session, but it was also frequently asserted that private bills should have low priority on the agenda of parliament.

It is increasingly common in modern literary theory to read that a text's meaning must be elicited from the textual ‘possibilities which are not said’. At this level of generality, the proposition applies equally to the interpretation of non-literary as literary texts. In this paper, I shall endeavour to illustrate the usefulness of this approach by considering the meaning of Locke's argument in Two treatises in terms of things which Locke chose not to say. I shall argue two points. First, I shall suggest that many of the controversies which have arisen in recent years about Locke's meaning have suffered because inadequate attention has been paid to the precise character of a number of silences in Locke's argument. The persistence of an inadequate framework for understanding the character of Englishmen's appeals to an original contract, constitutional law and history in the late seventeenth century will occupy my attention here. Second, I shall suggest that attention to the details of Locke's most significant silences can cast light on current controversies about the intellectual status of Locke's argument. In particular, I shall argue that the current tendency to locate Two treatises within a context of coded, conspiratorial politics is mistaken.

Historians of Tudor government have tended to write about the relationship between rulers and ruled in terms of the ability of central government to impose on the localities things which they did not want, in particular the Reformation and taxes to fight wars. Students of the localities have written in terms of the local obstructions in the way of the enforcement of central directives. Students of parliament have examined that institution in terms of its power to block government initiatives. Students of the institutions of central government have explored their subject in terms of the degree of ‘bureaucratic’ development exhibited by these institutions, in other words, how well suited they were to the task of efficient government. But there is another aspect to the functioning of Tudor government, and that is the ways in which subjects could secure their own objectives by use of its machinery. Recent research has begun to provide some insight into this neglected topic. It is axiomatic to revisionist writing on parliament that parliament was, primarily concerned with legislation, and that legislation was as much a matter for localities and interest groups as it was for the crown. Diarmaid MacCulloch and Stephen Kershaw have pointed to the ways in which local communities turned to the central courts, and even the privy council, for support against aggressive landlordism. The accessibility of parliament, the council and the law courts, it may be argued, was a major factor behind the stability of English society in this period, offering a variety of fora within which redress of grievances might be pursued.

For a brief time at the beginning of James I's reign purveyance appeared as the greatest grievance of the commonwealth, troubling the first two sessions of his first parliament. So much has long been known, but only recently has it been revealed how far the commons thought of going. The bills read in the house in 1604 and 1606, almost certainly identical or nearly so, did not look merely to remedy the abuses of purveyors, but to abolish purveyance itself – the king's right to be served provisions and carriage at prices below those current in the markets – which the house discovered was explicitly prohibited by numerous medieval statutes. The commons' refusal in the two sessions to buy the king out of his prerogative with a ‘composition’ was not then irresponsible, as one historian has suggested. The house could not readily agree to purchase what it had learned the king had no right to sell. The radical challenge to the king's prerogative embodied in the commons' bill, Dr Croft has recently argued, doomed the composition proposed by James's ministers. Instead, the house pursued its claims with ‘remarkable tenacity’, especially in 1606, when it passed the bill twice.

For most British readers, the Peninsular War is synonymous with the campaigns of Sir John Moore and the duke of Wellington. That this should be the case is hardly surprising in view of the fascination which they have exercised for many historians at the expense of other aspects of the struggle. In defence of such anglocentrism, it might be argued that British involvement was the decisive factor in the war and, further, that without the duke of Wellington the Iberian Peninsula would never have been freed from French domination. That is true enough, but it is also true that Wellington could never have been successful but for the continued resistance of the Spaniards and the Portuguese. Indeed, it is fair to say that without the thousands of Portuguese soldiers who served in his army, and the indirect assistance provided by the Spaniards in pinning down a large proportion of the French forces, the Duke was so outnumbered that he could never have carried the war into Spain at all. Given that Wellington could probably have maintained a British presence in Portugal almost indefinitely, the Spanish contribution is of particular importance. While the British were still bottled up in Portugal during 1810 and 1811, however, the French all but destroyed the basis for Spanish resistance. Had not the Russian campaign intervened to divert Napoleon's attention eastwards, and with it the vital reinforcements that might have completed the French conquest, Spain could conceivably have been subdued. Wellington's victories of 1812 and 1813 would then have been an impossibility.

In the penultimate chapter of St Matthew's gospel, immediately before the account of the betrayal by Judas, the story is told of a visit which Jesus paid to the house of Simon the leper. As he sat eating a woman came and poured a precious ointment over his head. The disciples were indignant, saying, in the words of King James's bible, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, why trouble ye the woman for she hath wrought a good work upon me? For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always’.

Most seventeenth-century English historians and analysts of periods of revolutionary activity, have viewed events in England between 1640 and 1660 as, at most, a failed political revolution which, while it may have temporarily transformed the political institutions of the English state, had little lasting impact on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Repeated emphasis of this fact, however, has tended to obscure another important aspect of these years – the concerted efforts of successive puritan governments during the 1640s and 1650s to make substantial alterations in the accepted cultural norms of seventeenth-century English society. More recently this latter point has been highlighted in the work of historians like John Morrill, who has investigated the attempt to impose an alien presbyterian religious system on the country, and David Underdown, who has described puritan efforts to regularize and restrict the more unruly elements of rural popular culture. They have shown that, although such reformist initiatives were unpopular and often resisted, they nevertheless represented a determined thrust for cultural change, and in the short term were seen by many as a real intrusion and a serious threat to traditional practice.

1848 has gone down in history – or rather in history books – as the year when England was different. In that year a wave of revolution on the Continent overthrew constitutions, premiers and even a dynasty but in England, by contrast, the middle classes rallied round the government and helped it preserve the status quo. This interpretation of 1848 has long been the established orthodoxy amongst historians. Asa Briggs took this view thirty years ago and it has lately been endorsed by F. B. Smith and Henry Weisser. Most recently, John Saville, in his book on 1848, has concluded that events in England ‘demonstrated beyond question and doubt, the complete and solid support of the middling strata to the defence of existing institutions’. He claims that ‘the outstanding feature of 1848 was the mass response to the call for special constables to assist the professional forces of state security’ which reflected a closing of ranks among all property owners. Although some historians, notably David Goodway, have recently stressed the vitality of Chartism in 1848 they have not challenged the traditional view that the movement failed to win concessions from the establishment and soon declined. Thus 1848 in England is generally regarded as a terminal date: the last chapter in the history of Chartism as a major movement. Thereafter Britain experienced a period of conservatism – described by one historian as ‘the mid-Victorian calm’–which lasted until the death of Palmerston in 1865.

Allied to Bismarck and more national than liberal, the National Liberal party split the liberal movement and became the largest and most successful party in Germany from 1867 to 1879. But it acted singularly ineffectively when it plunged headlong into the greatest crisis of its history by failing to support tax legislation during a year-long negotiation with Bismarck begun in the summer of 1877. For one thing, the party focused its attention on a single issue when many were at stake, any one of which could have been an obstacle to an agreement with Bismarck. Secondly, although its factions had continually demonstrated their willingness to reach unanimity, these agreements had taken so long to develop and lasted so briefly that in effect the party spent the greater part of a critical year in opposition to Bismarck. Furthermore, by weakening the degree of its commitments in response to Bismarck's hostility towards its demands, the National Liberal party appeared indecisive, unreliable and deceptive. The issue which had produced this inept behaviour was the implementation of the party goal of maintaining parliamentary power in Germany, specifically of assuring to the Reichstag the right to vote annually the sources of the revenue of the imperial government. The story of that issue is the concern of this article. It argues that knowledge of the tensions generated by divergent principles and goals on parliamentary rights will clarify both the schismatic tendencies and the character of the National Liberal party in the later 1870s. Thus the proper assessment of the role that the issue played in the history of the party requires that the actual decision-making process be counted at least equally with agreements. Whether continual co-operation among National Liberals on parliamentary rights was based upon increased hostility or cordiality has remained the critical and unanswered practical question.

Modern historians have been more confident than Restoration Englishmen in stating who the ‘latitudinarians’ were, what they held and where they dwelt. The ‘latitudinarians’ have been described as ‘the central force in the movement toward toleration which came from within the Restoration Church of England’ and as a clerical third force, neither anglican nor puritan, but united in an advocacy of ‘natural theology and rational Christianity’. Their ‘basic convictions’, as summarized by Professor Margaret Jacob, were that

rational argumentation and not faith is the final arbiter of Christian belief and dogma; scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are the most reliable means of explaining creation; and political and ecclesiastical moderation are the only realistic means by which the Reformation will be accomplished.

At the very end of December 1780 Britain formally broke off diplomatic relations with the Dutch Republic. The war which followed – the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780–84 – abruptly ended more than a century of friendship and alliance between the two states. It also proved to be a turning point in the Republic's domestic history: the shattering defeats inflicted by the superior British navy powerfully assisted the development of the Patriot movement, which was to break the mould of Dutch politics during the 1780s.

The final phase of Venizelism (1928–1933) has traditionally been considered as a period of considerable foreign policy accomplishments (e.g. friendship treaties with Italy, Yugoslavia and Turkey). Yet despite the attention which has been paid to these agreements, the period was clearly marked by the government's drive towards internal infrastructural changes via its commitment to extensive public works programmes. This effort necessitated a huge influx of capital from abroad; in fact, in the period between 1924 and 1931 more money entered the country than at any time since 1875–90. In this context, Britain's influential role was further enhanced as a result of the indispensability of the London credit market, and her financial presence in Greece was to set the tone and pace of Anglo-Greek relations. Probably no institution reflected this uneven relation more accurately than the International Financial Commission (I.F.C).

According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?

Property, in spite of its solid sound, is an elusive idea. As C. B. MacPherson puts it:

The actual institution, and the way people see it, and hence the meaning they give to the word, all change over time… The changes are related to changes in the purposes which society or the dominant classes in society expect the institution of property to serve.

The representative credentials of the unreformed parliament are a subject of enduring historical interest. It is not surprising that much of that interest has focused on the electoral basis of the house of commons. From the beginnings of an organized movement for parliamentary reform and the first systematic investigations of the subject, criticism fastened on the anomalies and inequities of a manifestly outdated franchise. Modern scholarship, emancipated from the bias of whig history, has been less harsh in its judgement, but equally preoccupied with elections and the electorate. Successive studies have demonstrated the vitality of popular electoral politics not merely in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before the onset of so-called oligarchy, but even in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when contemporary criticism was at its height.1 One of the unintended consequences of this successful search for the politics of participation has been a tendency to divert attention from the actual working of parliament, except in terms of those periodic crises, and great national issues, which were of manifest importance in the party politics of the day. Yet parliament in the eighteenth century concerned itself with an extraordinary variety of topics, and burdened itself with a remarkable quantity of business. After the revolution of 1688 it met annually for long, and lengthening sessions. It increasingly involved itself in the operations of government and played an ever more important part in the making and revision of law.