In twelfth and thirteenth-century England complaints that justice was being sold were common, culminating with King John's tacit admission in Magna Carta. Coupled with these complaints were charges of corruption against royal judges, or against royal aulici, curiales, or familiares, since until the middle of Richard I's reign no professional judiciary existed. Even in King John's time, familiares regis still served as judges. Yet a core of royal servants specializing in justice, “professionals” in a certain sense, had been created. Historians since Maitland have generally held a high opinion of these judges. According to Maitland, under Henry II and Richard I, “English law was administered by the ablest, the best educated men in the realm.…” F.M. Powicke wrote that the judiciary of Henry III was “probably the most stable and helpful, as it was the most intelligent, element in the State at this time.” How are we to reconcile historians' high opinion of the royal justices with their contemporaries' low opinion? Were the chroniclers simply drawing stock figures in their depictions of corrupt judges, or was their picture drawn from life?

Royal officials, including judges, proved popular targets for the pens of twelfth century moralists and satirists, some of whom wrote out of personal bitterness, having failed in the contest for royal patronage and high office.2 Capable of condemning curiales in classical Latin style was John of Salisbury. He knew many of Henry II's courtiers, and he came to despise them, especially those in clerical orders.

Reform of the law and the courts, especially the Court of Chancery, has been one of the most active areas of interest among historians concerned with the Interregnum period of English history. However, the authors on law reform have relied primarily upon the plethora of pamphlet literature and other printed materials which have led them to conclude that the legal profession obstructed reform of the law to protect its vested interests in offices and fees. Bulstrode Whitelocke, one of the lords commissioners of the great seal (the Chancery judges of the Interregnum) from 1649 to 1655, has long served historians as an example of the legal profession's refusal to assist or to cooperate in any meaningful reformation of the law or equity. Recently, Donald Veall, David Underdown, and Blair Worden have again laid the failure of reform at the door of the lawyers and judges who sat in the Rump, on commissions of law reform, and in the Protectorate parliaments. They have also assigned to Whitelocke a major responsibility for the defeat of law reform in the Rump, both before and after the Hale Commission's comprehensive plan of reform in January 1653, and in the first Protectorate Parliament in 1654. They believe, despite Whitelock's fervor for professional standards and his mild reforming tendencies, that he represented the major hurdle for any successful reform in law or equity.

Traditional religious distinctions gradually eroded in eighteenth-century England under the impact of enlightenment rationalism: reason replaced revelation as the criterion for belief, order ousted enthusiasm in worship, and interdenominationalism blurred sectarian boundaries in philanthropic endeavors. But the French Revolution, economic troubles and radical political activity after 1815, and intellectual Romanticism put an end to co-operation and encouraged the growth of denominational self-consciousness. That rise of denominationalism led to the greatest conflict between the sects and the Establishment since perhaps the mid-seventeenth century. The clash began on the local level in the 1820s when the Church attempted to use its legal powers to collect rates; the events of 1828-1829 ushered in a period of conflict on the national level, as well. The Church turned to the state for support, only to find that Whigs and Liberals, in power for most of the period before 1874, were erastians and latitudinarians. So the Church in its turn became militant; high-churchmen in particular came to distrust Parliament and to emphasize the independent sources of clerical authority in sacerdotalism and the apostolic succession.

The period from roughly 1830 to 1870 was one of heightened religious tension. Nonconformists, having gained civil equality, now attempted to eliminate other symbols of the Anglican hegemony. Roman Catholics, sloughing off anglo-gallicanism for ultramontanism, asserted their spiritual claims and talked of converting England.

Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister who was Resident Minister and political adviser at Algiers during 1943, devotes a chapter in his autobiographical volume dealing with World War II to the reactivation of the French naval squadron known as “Force X.” Although brief, impressionistic and lacking balance (students would be better advised to consult Sir Llewellyn Woodward's scholarly treatment), his account makes it evident that he had serious differences with Winston Churchill. The explanation he offers is that the Prime Minister resented his warning against the use of “bullying tactics.” Churchill, in his great war history, devotes only a brief paragraph to this curious episode and omits any reference to the important part Macmillan played. But a recent investigation of unpublished correspondence in the Prime Minister's Operational Papers, and of other pertinent materials, casts considerable light on the nature of their disagreement. These sources also provide valuable insights into the Force X problem generally, notably with respect to its linkage by Macmillan with the larger and much more important issue of French political unity. Actually minor in global war perspective, the Force X problem became a symbol of British difficulties in dealing with a defeated and divided France.

Force X was the French eastern Mediterranean squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral René Godfroy, which was blocked in the port of Alexandria by a more powerful British fleet at the time of the Franco-German armistice in June, 1940. It consisted of one battleship, four cruisers, three destroyers, a half-dozen torpedo boats, and one submarine. The Force X commander, although claiming to be an Anglophile, believed that the French government had no option at that critical juncture but to abandon its ally and to accept Hitler's cease-fire terms.