Political historians working on the early Tudor period have traditionally concentrated on institutions – monarchy, council, parliament, courts, and administrative bodies – that excluded women. The very definition of politics underlying the dominant historiography has thus made it seem both natural and inevitable to write history as if the world of high politics, the world that really counted, were exclusively male.

The phrase in the title is Charles I's. Writing from Newcastle to Henry Jermyn, John Culpepper and John Ashburnham in September 1646, he voiced his ‘unexpressable greefe andastonishment’ at the advice on the church which he had received from them during the course of his negotiations with the parliamentary commissioners. For they had assured Charles that, if he was no doubt‘ obliged’ by his conscience ‘to doe all’ that was in his ‘power to support and maintain that function of Bishops’, then he had already discharged that obligation to the full, as ‘all the world can witness’. Conscience, in this sense, had no further claims on him, nor could it be more strictly interpreted:

if by conscience is intended to assert that Episcopacy is jure divino exclusive, wherby no Protestant (or rather Christian) Church can be acknowledged for such without a Bishop, we must therin crave leave wholly to differ. And if we be in an errour, we are in good company; ther not being (as we have cause to believe) 6 persons of the Protestant Religion of the other opinion. Thus much we can add, that at the treaty of Uxbridge none of your Divines then present (though much provoked thereunto) would maintain that (we might say uncharitable) opinion, no not privatly amongst your commissioners. Nether doeth it follow that in this, or any the most riged, sence you are obliged to perish in company with Bishops meerly out of pitty (and certainly you have nothing els left to assist them with) or that monarchy ought to fall, because Episcopacy cannot stand.

Cardinal Richelieu's spectacular military intervention in Italy in 1629 plunged his ministry into a desperate crisis from which it only narrowly emerged intact. It marked the definitive departure of France upon the difficult road of outright opposition to the Habsburg hegemony in Europe. This policy – as the cardinal well knew – was in many ways potentially counter-productive, with a risk factor so high that failure might well entail the end, not only of his personal career, but with it the adolescent Bourbon state. Indeed, his initiative had the almost immediate consequence of a rebellious challenge from a prince of the blood and his domestic allies, amounting to a prototype fronde des princes. For decades to come, French society was to be impoverished by the manifold negative impact of war, while political stability was persistently affected by the unrelenting material and ideological pressures of continuous hostilities.

Henry VII called a number of Great Councils, as his predecessors had for at least two centuries before. Evidence has survived for five such Councils, held in 1487, 1488, 1491, 1496 and 1502. They advised the king on important matters of foreign policy and internal security, with the result that diplomatic and military action was taken and taxes were levied. They each lasted for perhaps two or three weeks, and were attended by lords spiritual and temporal, royal officials, and – on two occasions – by the elected representatives of boroughs. In three cases they coincided with meetings of the clergy in Convocation. Henry VII also held major sessions of his ‘ordinary’ council, lasting for several days at a time, sometimes for over two weeks, and attended by between twenty and sixty people; such large assemblies had been named ‘Great Councils’ in previous reigns, although under Henry VII this does not seem to have been the case. By the end of the Tudor period, by 1603, there is little question that both types of political assembly had disappeared; both the quasi-parliamentary Great Councils and the conciliar ‘Great Councils’. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to determine when this disappearance occurred and to offer some tentative suggestions as to how it happened and with what political consequences.

In the eighteenth century, parish officers used the laws of settlement to regulate the immigration of the poor to their parishes. Their regulation went well beyond ridding their parishes of indigent immigrants. Parish officers monitored the immigration of the non-indigent poor; they insured that their parishes acquired the documents which guaranteed that a poor immigrant would not become the responsibility of the parish to which he had immigrated; and they even removed non-indigent immigrants from their parishes, using their parishes' funds to pay for sending these immigrants back to the parishes which were legally responsible for their welfare.1 To the modern observer, such regulation of migration from one parish to another may seem odd, so odd that some historians have assumed that this regulatory activity did not occur.2 Obviously, then, the parishes' regulation of immigration was part of a world now lost. Regulation of immigration by parish officers disappeared in 1795, when parliament abolished the legal foundations for this practice.3 In detective stories, discovery of the circumstances and implications of a disappearance reveals the structure of the world in which it occurred. So may it be with the regulation of immigration.

‘No member of this House’, proclaimed Bulstrode Whitelocke in February 1642 ‘ought to publish any speech or passage of this House, though it be very frequent.’ Very frequent it was; by this stage of the Long Parliament more than 100 purported speeches of named members were in printed circulation. Orations attributed to 45 M.P.s had been published, at a time when only ‘75 M.P.s made the motions, spoke to the issues, and delivered the reports of conferences and committees’. Printed speeches must have become a familiar genre to the customers of London booksellers. Invariably they were quarto in format; typically a pamphlet consisted of a single address, between three and eight sides in length and carelessly printed. Titles were informative and unpretentious: Mr. Thomas Pury his Speech upon the clause, the which concerns Deans and Chapters is a representative example. Most gave the date, or alleged date, of delivery, and the name of the printer responsible. There was nothing surreptitious, in other words, about the phenomenon. The chronological Thomason catalogue shows that speeches were significantly more numerous than any other kind of ephemeral tract, at least until March 1642, and that during the first session they were the only source of printed information about parliamentary debates. After March 1642 the flow of publication dried up. Large-scale publication of individual parliamentary speeches is therefore unique to a particular fifteen month period. Their importance, as historical sources, hardly needs stressing. The purpose of this article is primarily to explain the nature, and limitations, of the evidence this material can provide.

When his colleagues at the beginning of the 1621 session were puzzling over whether supply should precede redress of grievances or vice versa, Sir George More rose to give them the benefit of his considerable experience. The question could best be resolved, he suggested, if redress and supply were thought of ‘as twins, asJacob and Esau’ which ‘should go hand in hand, for though grievances go first, yet the blessing may be upon subsidies’. The biblical analogy was quite clear. Although grievances like Esau had precedence as the elder of the twins, the two should in fact ‘go hand in hand’ through the House; at the closing, the order would be reversed and the subsidy would first receive the blessing just as the younger of Isaac's twins eventually did.

The virus of violent, personal vendetta had poisoned the blood of elite society in Piedmont by the time the country was formally annexed to France in April 1802. The turbulent events of the period 1794–1801 had inflamed and then politicized a society ‘whose customs steadfastly retained something of the unruly and fiercesome’, as Sauli d'Igliano, the son of a petty count from Ceva, chose to describe it when writing of his childhood in the mid-1790s. The revolutionary process unleashed and, finally, entrenched that penchant for violence among ‘men of the second order’ that Giuseppe Baretti had informed the whole of Europe of a generation earlier in his widely read An account of the manners and customs of Italy: ‘they are withal so punctilious and so ready to draw the sword, that more duels are fought in Piedmont than in the rest of Italy taken together’. The venom of revolution mingled with the poison of personal vendettas and brought their ferocity to the centre of political life. It was a virus the French would strive to stamp out, but one that would malinger in the subalpine body politic throughout their own rule and long after they had gone. As late as 1813, a substantial landowner of Bene, in southern Piedmont complained of his patriot maire's ‘despotisme et ses actes arbitraires…sans nombre’.

From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the middle of the eighteenth century a protracted controversy took place over whether foreigners ought to be encouraged to come to settle in England. The debate was usually couched in terms of whether aliens should be offered naturalization in England. The word naturalize was sometimes used not in a technical legal sense, but in the first sense given in Johnson's Dictionary: ‘to adopt into a community’. In its stricter sense, the question was whether a cheap and convenient way should be offered to immigrants to acquire the rights of native-born English subjects. It was thought by both its advocates and its enemies that such an offer, by means of an act of general naturalization, would encourage a large influx of foreign protestants. The issue was debated repeatedly in parliament. Over a dozen attempts were made to pass an act for a general naturalization between the Restoration and the final passage of such an act in 1709. The act of 1709 was repealed only three years after its passage, but several more bills for a similar statute were introduced towards the middle of the century. The naturalization controversy is more easily followed, however, in the pages of the tracts, pamphlets, treatises, and broadsides, both in favour of and in opposition to a general naturalization, that tumbled from the presses throughout the period, and most profusely in the 1680s, 1690s, and 1700s. The debate aroused the interest especially of the growing ranks of those who, after the Restoration, interested themselves in trade matters.

The suffrage for the German Reichstag had by the 1890s become the most potent symbol of democratic ideas in imperial Germany. ‘Universal, equal, secret, and direct’, as contemporaries described it, the Reichstag suffrage stood in contrast to restrictive state suffrages as a model of liberty and fairness. By the turn of the century, 70–80 per cent of adult male German citizens took advantage of their right to participate in this, the freest of all German political arenas.

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.

The history of economic ideas in Britain is dominated by a great tradition which in its early stages focuses on Adam Smith. For the century before the publication of the Wealth of nations in 1776, economic ideas are most often studied in relation to the ‘arrival’ of Smith and commented on with regard to the degree to which they may be considered precursors of his ideas. Though this imposes a sense of order and establishes some principles with which to select from the vast range of economic writings, the dangers of certain whiggishness in this approach are readily apparent. Writers can appear to be winners or losers depending on the extent to which their ideas were denied, adapted or adopted by Smith and the other classical economists.1 Such problems have been acknowledged by many historians, not least by those who have fruitfully examined the political and philosophical bases of the emergence of political economy, particularly with regard to the Scottish enlightenment. Despite this, the force of the great tradition remains very strong. The authors and ideas that are examined are the ‘major’ ones, that is to say contributions that were, or attempted to be, either comprehensive or clearly attached to what, with hindsight, were the main strands of development. The emphasis has been upon theories or systematic explanations of the economic order. Not surprisingly the unsystematic and more casually formulated reflections of non-economists and ‘amateurs’, such as Defoe, are often swept under the carpet, even if their ideas on economic matters were more widely disseminated (and perhaps more influential) at the time. Consequently, our perception of economic ideas between the Restoration and the Wealth of nations continues to be highly and perhaps atypically selective.

Like the ‘Tory in clogs’ of Edwardian Britain, the Unionist working man has generally eluded the historian of modern Ireland. Indeed, to some extent, the image of Irish Unionism, whether popular or scholarly, has been supplied by the apologetic biographers of the ‘great men’ of loyalism, and by the rhetoric of political opponents like Michael Farrell: at any rate the historiography of the movement is peopled with irredentist squires and Anglo-Irish peers, bowler-hatted Orange artisans – Engel's ‘Protestant brag-garts’ – and cynical industrial barons. The existence of a more popular Unionism is acknowledged, though only in a context (the militancy of 1912, the bravura of 12 July marches) when it may not be ignored: even so, as with an older scholarly attitude towards popular British toryism, there has been a tendency among historians to treat mass Unionism as a freak of progress, demanding apologetic explanation rather than sustained illumination. With the institutions of popular Conservatism now, after thirty years of historical research, a firm feature of the British historical landscape, the need to reveal something of the electoral base of Ulster Unionism is all the more apparent. This is particularly true of the rural hinterland of the loyalist movement which, even more than Belfast, has been the victim of neglect.

My first research for this lecture1 was into the name and fame of Lewis Fry, whom it commemorates. The university administration kindly told me that Lewis Fry played a leading role in Bristol's founding, such that a contemporary could call him ‘the father of the university’. It is a nostalgic thought today, for all ofus in British universities, that we once had anything so benevolent as a father. Our institutions now feel like orphans in a harsh world, whose only remaining relative – here (as Canon Chasuble would have hastened to add) I speak metaphorically, my metaphor is drawn from fairy-story – is an unloving and nagging step-mother. The more reason to honour and celebrate past benefactors of liberal education who had humane vision.

Scottish philosophical history has received its characterization from the programme of social enquiry typical of the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed recently, the historical thinking of two of its philosophers, Hume and Smith, has been seen as the superstructure of their philosophies of mind.

The thirteenth edition of The campaign guide: A handbook for unionist speakers was published on the eve of the Great War. This massive 900 page Guide, like its predecessors, was ‘prepared with a view to giving to Unionist Candidates and Speakers…a handy reference work covering the whole field of contemporary political controversy.’ The fourth largest chapter in the book (74 pages) dealt with Ireland and was reflective of the ‘present position’of ‘THE IRISH QUESTION’ being ‘in the front rank of political controversy’ Four years later Election notes, an 87 page pamphlet assembled prior to the 1918 election as a hasty substitute for what would have been an entirely inappropriate Campaign guide, had no chapter on Ireland, no reference to the Irish question in the index and, in fact, conveyed not a single word on the subject.

Few works of economic thought have such a close association with the intellectual and economic history of their period as Adam Smith's An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Three recent careful assessments of the ‘influence’ of Smith's work, however, have found little direct evidence for its positive significance for economic policy in the 1780s and 1790s. Parliamentary debate seldom referred to the Wealth of nations, and then usually negatively unless by Smith's friends, or ‘radicals and Foxite whigs’. John Locke, David Hume, Charles Davenant, Sir Josiah Child, William Petty, Josiah Tucker and Arthur Young were all cited more frequently. A wide range of parliamentary leaders read Smith carefully, and several ministers knew him well and sought his advice, but with the exception of Shelburne they appear to have applied Smith's thought eclectically. Salim Rashid has noted that in 1776 there were already influential economic authorities, notably Arthur Young and Josiah Tucker, who advocated freer markets. Conversely, for over a decade after the publication of the Wealth of nations, articles on economic matters in the major periodical reviews made scanty reference to Smith's work, while the protectionist views of Sir James Steuart, whom Smith had ignored, were often authoritative. Smith's views became respectable among the political after negotiation of the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, but it was this liberal economic policy which gave the wealth of nations currency, not the reverse.

Everyone knows that Edwin Chadwick wrote the New Poor Law; or, rather, that he wrote the report – issued in 1834 by the royal commission appointed two years earlier to inquire into the poor laws – which formed the basis for the New Poor Law. The well-informed among us might add the name of the political economist Nassau Senior as Chadwick's co-author. But few would be able to supply any of the further seven names which stood with Chadwick's and Senior's as co-signatories to the report. These seven royal commissioners were Bishop Blomfield of London, Bishop Sumner of Chester, William Sturges Bourne, M.P., the Rev. Henry Bishop, Henry Gawler, Walter Coulson, and James Traill.