It is the purpose of this essay to explain the background and nature of proctorial representation and plural voting in the early Tudor period; to deter-mine the extent of absenteeism and proctorial representation in the House of Lords during the reign of Henry VIII; to single out and briefly discuss the principal procurators in the upper house; and to demonstrate how the Crown utilized and perfected the proxy system to manage the House of Lords. Just as an earlier essay dealt with the origin and evolution of proctorial representation in pre-Tudor times, so subsequent articles covering the late Tudor and Stuart periods will follow in due time.

Filmer's political thought was made up of four elements. First of all, there were his critical remarks about some of the key ideas of his opponents, his analysis of such concepts as social contract, supremacy of the people, mixed government, and the like. Then there were his inquiries into the constitutional and legal history of this country which enabled him to show, for instance, that the claim of the House of Commons to have been time out of mind an integral part of Parliament equal to Lords and monarch was not tenable. Thirdly, there was his assimilation of royal to paternal power, an analogy fundamentally cast in terms of the philosophy and political theory of order and which enabled him to ascribe the undoubted contemporary authority of a paterfamilias to the pater patriae. Finally, there was a genea-logical argument purporting to derive the supreme authority of a king neither from the people over whom he ruled nor from some ecclesiastical intermediary like the pope but lineally from God through inheritance of the dominion which had been divinely bestowed upon Adam.

Political and historical studies are still severely handicapped by the absence of an historical dictionary of political terms and slogans. Without such a dictionary the investigation of significant political expressions is still very difficult and time-consuming, while the process of critical political self-understanding and education lacks a vital tool. The great philological dictionaries of the European languages are of little help in this field of political semantics, because they have been the work of scholars whose main interest was philology and literature. International links, historical perspective, and political sensitivity can be found in no dictionary of the English, French, or German language. Littré's French dictionary notes that Europe is the name of a number of heavenly bodies and plays a part in Greek mythology. The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, treats Europe as a proper name and omits it altogether. Without the benefit of competent lexicographical guidance the intensive historical study of the idea of Europe, which has been carried out for the last twenty years, has failed to discover the time and circumstances which led to the adoption of Europe as a symbol of political interest. The main fault of past historical investigations lies in a concentration on literary works and famous men of letters and a neglect of political literature, pamphlets, and diplomatic documents. Political expressions are the offspring of national and international conflicts. They become stereotyped symbols of loyalty or enmity and one criterion of their establishment in political life is the frequency of their use—and abuse—by one recognizable political group. When and how did this first happen to Europe?

The history of the intendants, so important to the understanding of France during the latter two centuries of the ancien régime, remains unwritten. There are of course particular studies of various great intendants of Louis XIV and of Louis XV, but the institution as a whole remains astonishingly ill-known, and this is especially true of its early years. Gabriel Hanotaux did make a brave attempt in 1884 to work out the Origines de l'institution des intendants des provinces, but his arguments have been severely criticized by subsequent writers, whose strictures have most recently been summarized by Roger Doucet in Les institutions de la France au XVIe siècle. As Doucet points out, the source-material used by Hanotaux was limited to a few Parisian manuscripts and, for the reign of Henri IV, essentially to the Lettres Missives of that king. For the reign of Henri III, Doucet adds, his work is weak in that he ignores the increase in the traditional chevauchées (tours of inspection) of the maîtres des requêtes, surely one of the most suggestive of early institutions in our present context. This in turn springs from a more basic weakness, that of using only a titular and not a functional definition for his subject; in refusing to consider any officers other than those who actually held the title intendant (usually de justice). Doucet himself does not carry the investigation any further for, as he remarks, the only way to do this would be by undertaking a series of studies in local archives.

In February and March 1539 Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, visited Calais on a commission for examining the town's fortifications. Returning to England, he promised Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle, the lord deputy of Calais, who had entertained him during his stay, his goodlordship and a horse with saddle and harness. In exchange, Lisle's wife dispatched from Calais a present of a stole and a linnet, and she also asked the Seymours if her daughter by a previous marriage might be placed in their care. The exchange of gifts derived partly from the amicability struck up during Seymour's visit; but it was also part of an act of reconciliation. In the previous five years or so, the Lisles and Seymour had clashed, bitterly but not violently, in two land disputes. In the first dispute, the ageing, grossly inefficient, heavily indebted, blue-blooded and heirless Lisle was the victim; in the second dispute, it was Lady Lisle's son by her first marriage. In each dispute, Edward Seymour was the aggressor, unmercifully exploiting legal loopholes. In each case, in the first instance, when the matter came before the law, Seymour was thwarted: by an award in Chancery in the first dispute, and by the king's intervention in the Court of Common Pleas in the second; and then, by more devious means, he managed to have his way. The disputes shed light on the personality of Edward Seymour, the future protector Somerset, and also upon the power and influence open to certain subjects within the Tudor system of government.

Recently several works have illuminated the important role played by diplomats in the course of the religious wars of the latter half of the sixteenth century. We propose to shed some additional light on this general subject by studying the often curious activities of some Spanish envoys to France and England with respect to Spanish Protestants who had taken refuge in those lands. Through a careful scrutiny of related but seemingly minor matters we can frequently learn more about major ones.

In November 1792 John Reeves, with the explicit approval and active sup-port of both the government and the Windhamite Whigs, and with the countenance of the duke of Portland and his friends, instituted a movement of loyalist associations which quickly spread throughout the country. The movement was founded in reaction to an enthusiastic resurgence of British radical activity which followed the defeat of the combined armies under the duke of Brunswick, and it rallied a now militant conservative sentiment in favour of detecting and suppressing by intimidation and public prosecution all allegedly seditious activities. This crisis in public opinion, which was at once the parent and the offspring of the loyalist association movement, was not the first to have occurred in 1792. An earlier crisis occurred in favour of the political left during the late spring of 1792 and was followed by a relatively mild reaction to the right. It seems clear that, during the earlier months of 1792 at least, there were considerable bodies of both conservative and liberal opinion of various shades in the country. But by the beginning of the following year the complexity and ferment of the political scene had become so great that it is not at all clear to what extent or how rapidly liberal opinion had been supplanted in the country by conservative sentiment. The purpose of this paper is to reassess the nature, effect and significance of the loyalist association movement by undertaking a more careful examination of the phraseology of many of its addresses and declarations as well as of the proceedings and circumstances peculiar to the meetings in which they were approved.

Traditionally, the first English Reform Act has been conceived within the context of two discreet but overlapping models. Both separately and together these models have performed two important functions. They have provided a means of defining the nature and dynamics of the Act itself by relating certain of its crucial provisions to certain aspects of the pre-reform constituency structure. They have also provided a means of relating the Act as a whole—and as thus defined—to the general course of British history in the nineteenth century, to the general problems of explaining how Britain was transformed from an aristocracy to a democracy, from a rural and agri-cultural society to an urban and industrial one, from a Gemeinschaft to a Gesellschaft.

The ‘Final Court’ of Appeal in causes ecclesiastical in this period was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as amended by 3 and 4 Viet. c. 86, s. 16, whereby every archbishop or bishop who was a Privy Councillor was made a full member of the Committee for Ecclesiastical Appeals, and one at least of them had to sit. The function of the Judicial Committee as the final arbiter of legal questions which might involve Anglican doctrine and usage was much criticized by churchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Criticism was directed mainly along two channels. It was argued that the Church's freedom to mould her own spiritual life could not be absolute while the Crown, through the Judicial Committee, might, by accident or intention, interfere in questions of doctrine. This argument aimed at removing the Church from all external judicial supervision and implied the eventual dis-solution of the constitutional bond between Church and State—a prospect which a few extreme High Churchmen regarded with equanimity. The other main criticism was that the Judicial Committee, as amended by 3 and 4 Viet, c. 86, was neither a truly civil nor a truly ecclesiastical court, but merely, as Gladstone described it in 1850, ‘pseudo-ecclesiastical’. Of this point of view, Bishop Wilberforce was the most consistent and the most powerful representative.

The modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work ‘incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory’ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography that Hobbes's ‘extraordinary boldness’ set him completely ‘outside the main stream of English political thought’ in his time. The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ‘against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition’, but that the tradition (‘fortunately’) proved too strong for him. Hobbes was ‘the first to attack its fundamental assumptions’, but no one followed his lead. Although he ‘tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions’, he succeeded only in provoking ‘the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles’, a re-assertion, in fact, of ‘the main English political tradition’. And the more Leviathan has become accepted as ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece’ of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as ‘an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity’. Hobbes's system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the ‘intense opposition’ which its ‘boldness and originality’ were to provoke.

Ever since the First World War, but especially during the Weimar period, Bismarck's dismissal has exercised a strong attraction on German historians, and has probably received more attention than any other event in the history of the Second Reich. In the troubled post-war years, 20 March 1890 seemed to stand out prominently as the fateful turning point of Germany's history. Wilhelm Schvissler, the first to exploit the unprecedented wealth of evidence available in consequence of the monarchy's collapse, did not hesitate to claim that ‘even at that time [1890] the downfall (Untergang) of the German Reich was written in the stars’. ‘Who would doubt’, he asked, ‘that our misfortune began there…and led to the catastrophe of the Imperial Monarchy and the German Reich—exactly 20 years after his [Bismarck's] death!’ This highly emotional approach to the subject was fully shared by Wilhelm Mommsen, whose standard work on the role of the political parties in the crisis appeared in 1924. Bismarck's fall, he wrote, ‘appears to us today as a turning point of German history, and it is only with deep feeling that we can recall the events of March 1890’. It is perhaps partly for this reason that these early writers tended to misinterpret the nature of Bismarck's relations with the parties in the crucial months before his fall. There was, for one thing, an inclination to idealize the bygone age in which ‘the State’ was thought to have stood incorruptibly ‘above the parties’, and as a result the party struggles of 1889 and 1890 were relegated to a self-contained compartment whence, it was held, they were able to influence the course of events only in the negative sense of providing no obstacle to the chancellor's dismissal. The influential work of Hans Rothfels probably typified this attitude, but even Mommsen warned his readers that his study of the parties could throw at best an oblique light on the crisis ‘since the parties had no direct and at any rate no significant effect on the course of those events’. According to Hans Herzfeld's summary of the present state of knowledge on the subject, this view is still widely accepted today.

By the end of the nineteenth century the British Cabinet system was still distinguished by autonomy among the great departments of state. It was especially true of the War Office and the Admiralty. The claim has sometimes been made that coherence in the making of naval and military policy was finally achieved with the Committee of Imperial Defence after its formation in 1903. J. P. Mackintosh has shown that the claim can no longer be sustained, that War Office and Admiralty continued to form their separate plans with little or no direction from the C.I.D. They could have been induced to co-operate on the highest level only through pressure from the Cabinet and the prime minister. Neither Campbell-Bannerman nor Asquith took much interest in defence, and while Arthur Balfour did, yet he lacked the qualities of an effective administrator.‘He did not turn to the departments and insist that the conclusions of the Committee should be the basis on which they worked.’

In the constitutional evolution of eighteenth-century Britain a major problem was the resolution of the tensions which arose between the executive powers vested in the Crown and the legislative supremacy of Parliament. Although the seventeenth-century conflicts of Crown and Parliament had settled the question of ultimate supremacy in favour of Parliament, eighteenth-century politics, by common consent, were confined to the level where a balance of power could be seen to operate, in which king, Lords, and Commons exercised agreed functions and powers and where the ultimate weapon—parliamentary supremacy—need not be used. The independence of the Crown—however it may have operated in practice—was a cardinal doctrine of the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution. Although this doctrine was usually invoked to support the right of the king to choose his own ministers, it gave an important constitutional role to the Civil List, for by supplying the Crown with a financial provision not subject to parliamentary control the Civil List served the pur-pose of supporting the independence and the ‘influence’ of the Crown. The uncontrolled expenditure of the Civil List, with its large number of attractive places, pensions, and other benefits, was an important part of that ‘influence’ which some considered necessary for the effective exercise of executive power and which others decried as a threat to the independence of Parliament. The disputes and jealousies created by the Civil List developed in the reigns of George I and George II and came to a climax in the reign of George III. The result was an alteration of the constitutional foundation of the Civil List which further weakened the doctrine of the independence of the Crown and which marked an important step in the evolution of parliamentary government.

The Eastern Front of the First World War remains, as Winston Churchill called his book on it, ‘The Unknown War’. Whereas in the West, politics were dominated by the military events, the reverse happened in the East: the gigantic struggles which took place from the Baltic to the Black Sea now seem to have been but a prelude to the Revolution in Russia and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There has been little interest in the military aspects of the Eastern conflict.

By bringing the Botha-Smuts ministry to power in 1907, the ‘Vereeniging Het Volk’ (the ‘People's Union’) restored supremacy in the Transvaal to the Boers, less than five years after a war fought with the avowed object of wresting that supremacy from them. One might argue that, given the grant of self-government, this achievement owed less to the organizing techniques of Het Volk as a party, than to the numerical strength and the cohesion of the Boers as a community; but even so, the importance of Het Volk would be established as the expression, at the level of a political party, of these social facts. Coming into existence alongside other parties, before the introduction of self-government, Het Volk helped ensure that under the new constitution a fully fledged party system would function from the beginning.

The English-speaking society of nineteenth-century Colombo, as in other areas in Ceylon gradually acquiring an urban character, was composed of two main units—the European, and the native. Within both were intricate subdivisions, which 'Sampson Brown’ described in a comic sketch of 1842:

Glibb and I have had some rather long chats about the natives and their moral character. They certainly are a most repelling race: there's no making anything of them as yet, and I doubt if we ever shall…A native of one particular caste will not marry into or associate with another and so the whole race of them is split into small factions. This is bad enough say you, but…the white man's caste rages [sic] as widely and deeply as that of the Buddhist…In Ceylon you find the Burgher caste, the Civil caste, the Military caste, and the Mercantile caste, all little worlds distinct from each other, travelling in different orbits. They would not dine with each other, I suppose, if their existence depended on it.

In July 1905 Lord Kitchener, the Indian chief of General Staff, wrote at the krequest of the viceroy a memorandum entitled A note on the Military policy of India, which was in due course sent to England for consideration by the home government. Its plea was for a consistent policy with regard to the North-West Frontier. At the moment, Kitchener complained, this was ‘apt to change with every ministry and almost with every minister, while each incoming Viceroy probably develops a policy of his own’. The main danger facing India was uncompromisingly described as ‘the menacing advance of Russia towards our frontiers’.