In his attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Dr. De Puebla, Spain's first resident ambassador to England, Garrett Mattingly dismissed as unimportant certain unflattering remarks about the envoy made by a royal councillor to two Spanish officials, who knew the councillor as Dr. Pedro Panec. Mattingly, unable to identify Panec, believed him to be insignificant in Tudor service and, therefore, his remarks to be uninformed. Nonetheless, the available sources reveal Pierre Le Pennec as the Spaniards' Dr. Panec, a cleric and lawyer from Morlaix, doctor of civil and canon laws, prothonotary of the Roman Church, king's clerk and councillor, and political agent in Henry VII's foreign service.

Historians of early Tudor diplomacy (when the term is not used interchangeably with foreign policy) have focused on the routine functions of ordinary diplomatic representatives, but Pennec has not merited the interest of Tudor diplomatic historians because he did not serve extensively as one of the king's ordinary diplomats. His only ordinary diplomatic function was in 1499 when he carried procuratorial letters to the Roman Curia for Henry VII.

My past attacks on the use of hindsight as a tool for explaining the parliamentary politics of the 1620s were not based on any desire to evade the task of explaining the English Civil War. They were based on the belief that it was necessary to understand what did happen in the 1620s before it could become possible to use those events to shed light on the English Civil War. The argument was that the search for the causes of the Civil War had impeded any attempt to see the 1620s as they actually were. That was why I attempted to find out what had happened in the 1620s as a task in its own right, before going on to investigate the coming and the causes of the English Civil War.

It is only because I have already attempted both these questions, and provided answers at least to my own satisfaction, that I now feel free to look back again at the 1620s, and attempt to ask the question what issues, and what attitudes, distinguish a future Royalist from a future Parliamentarian during those years. This is, of course, a very different question from asking what were the key issues of the 1620s. Very often, the issues that transpire to be the best predictors of Civil War allegiance were, at the time, low-priority and poorly reported issues. Attempts to investigate them are not meant to endow them with an importance they did not necessarily possess at the time, nor to suggest any inevitability about the division of England along the lines they suggest. The Civil War was only one of many ways in which the English body politic might have been divided: under a different king, for example, quite different disagreements might have been forced to the surface as the agenda developed. Yet, once it is granted this is not the only way Englishmen might have been divided, it is still worth asking whether the division that actually surfaced corresponds to any visible division in the politics of the 1620s. None of this is an attempt to reopen the debate on “revisionism” in the 1620s. That debate has now acquired a half life of its own, and this article is not intended to take any part in it. It is, though, inevitably informed by thirteen years' work on the politics of the Long Parliament, and so incorporates perceptions of how different the 1620s were from the 1640s, which no other programme of work could have made equally intense.

A dozen years ago Conrad Russell initiated a major historiographical debate when he rejected the traditional interpretation of seventeenth-century parliamentary history expounded in the classic studies of S. R. Gardiner and Wallace Notestein, whose work on early Stuart parliaments dominated the field for three quarters of a century. According to Russell, Gardiner's and Notestein's conviction that Jacobean and Caroline parliaments were the scene of escalating constitutional conflicts between the Crown and the House of Commons was the result of the two historians' failure to understand either the nature of early Stuart politics or seventeenth-century notions of Parliament's proper functions. Politics in general and parliamentary politics in particular were devoid of ideological content, and the provincial gentry who filled the benches of the House of Commons were as certain as the rest of their countrymen that the “proper business” of Parliament was the passing of bills, not the debating of issues of national or constitutional significance. Russell, of course, did not suggest that the conflicts so crucial to the traditional interpretation were made out of whole cloth, but he did deny that disagreements between Crown and Parliament were due to the emergence of a constitutional opposition. Instead, such disagreements were the inevitable product of the pervasive tension that marked the relationship between the royal government in London and the local communities in the provinces. During the reigns of James I and Charles I, the Crown's incompetent parliamentary management made it more difficult than usual for local gentlemen to reconcile their obligations to their king with their loyalties to their communities. The result was some remarkably unhappy parliaments, but since no important issue of principle divided parliamentary leaders from privy councilors or officers of state, there could be no organized, ideologically based opposition, no constitutional crisis leading inexorably to civil war.

The accession of William III began a revolution in English foreign policy. Under the Dutch king's auspices England joined a Grand Alliance against the France of Louis XIV and shouldered the burdens of a principal partner in a major continental war. Not only did the war place grave financial strains upon the state; the formulation, administration, and execution of war policy also became areas of continual concern. These concerns combined to raise general questions about England's proper role in European affairs and about the proper application of English power in service of those interests. They also cast William III and the politicians into a constitutional no-man's land in which the royal monopoly over war and peace had to contest with the need to secure annual supplies. It has been the historian's task to explain how William III's “continental commitment” to land warfare, alliances, and defense of European liberties survived this political struggle.

In January 1912 in an article on “British Banking Interests in South America,” the South American Journal advised its readers that while British banks were unquestionably profitable investments they did not have the field entirely to themselves, “for they not only had to face the competition of local, in many cases State-owned banks, but also the competition of several very successful and strong German banking companies, such as the Deutsche Bank, etc.” Nevertheless, British banks had the advantage of considerable experience in the business, an experience at that time dating back nearly fifty years. This statement gives direct expression to the theme of this paper, namely, the continuing prosperity of the British overseas banks in Latin America despite the competition of the more recently established, but nonetheless very successful, German overseas banks. Moreover, aside from the inevitable competition from local Latin American banks, it is to be noted that the only foreign competitors mentioned are the German banks. This was because the several Spanish, French, and Italian banks in the region had much more the structure and character of Latin American institutions based on investment and support from the local immigrant communities of those nations rather than the structure of overseas banks run from Europe.