1988 and 1989 have been vintage years all over the world for centenary celebrations. People have celebrated the centenary of the Eiffel Tower, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the bicentenary of Australia, the bicentenary of the American Bill of Rights, the quatercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the sexcentenary of the battle of Kosovo (this one may have escaped your notice, but it brought over a million people to a gathering in the city of Pristina in Yugoslavia in June 1989), and, of course, the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1688–89, with which I am concerned tonight. You will have no trouble believing that I have been “concerned with” and “celebrating” the Glorious Revolution for two years now, but I want to confess to you in the intimacy of this festive occasion that it has really been at least ten years, and that sometimes it feels more like three hundred!

How did centennial observances start? Why do people go to trouble, take time, and spend money to call to mind an event that happened one, two, or three hundred years ago? What is it about centennial moments that turns serious-minded, scholarly-inclined historians like ourselves into “party people”? What do celebrations tell us about the uses of the past in successive “presents”? The fact is that celebrations, each varying in character, have attended the Glorious Revolution from its beginnings on through each centennial anniversary thereafter — in 1788–89, 1888–89, and 1988–89. The observances at these centennial moments not only celebrated the Revolution itself, but also served, even as they reflected, current political, cultural, and/or economic ideas and goals. In a long perspective, the celebrations are an important part of the political and cultural history of the Revolution of 1688–89 itself. They illustrate how high and low politics may intersect, show how political ideas circulate through society and undergo transformation, and offer an index of changing ideological and cultural assumptions and aspirations over three hundred years.

The English Historical Review for 1974 published an intriguing proposal by Braxton Ross concerning the early history of Bodleian MS Canon. Pat. Lat. 131, a twelfth-century copy of Lactantius' Divine Institutes. Ross noticed several marginalia that read “Audi Thoma” or “Henriciani Nota,” and he suggested that these might have been penned by an unknown French cleric who wished to criticize Henry II's chancellor, Thomas Becket. From fourteenth-century writings contained on the manuscript's fly-leaves, scholars have long recognized the Bodleian Lactantius as once having been the property of Landolfo Colonna, a canon at Chartres in the years 1298–1328. On paleographical grounds, Ross assigns the manuscript's provenance to central France in the twelfth century. Noting that the Istitutiones Divinae was a rare text at the time — apparently unknown in England from Alcuin's day until the fourteenth century — and that this “utilitarian” yet “handsome” manuscript was made using two exemplars, Ross concludes that the Bodleian Lactantius originated in “a centre of intellectual vigour and wide-ranging connections.” Three hands corrected the text, all at the site of production. One of these hands has left many remarks that (Ross felt) display the annotator's wide classical and patristic reading and, as the “Audi Thoma” notes seem to suggest, an interest in Thomas Becket and the “Henricians.”

In his celebrated presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society between 1974 and 1976 Sir Geoffrey Elton explored three “points of contact” between central authority and local communities: Parliament, the royal council, and the royal court. Parliament, he argued, was “the premier point of contact,” which “fulfilled its functions as a stabilizing mechanism because it was usable and used to satisfy legitimate and potentially powerful aspirations.” Elsewhere Elton, and other parliamentary historians such as Michael Graves, Norman Jones, and Jennifer Loach, have stressed parliament's role as a clearing house for the legislative desires of the governing class. The author of this article has recently drawn attention to the pressures which private legislation placed on the parliamentary agenda and the attempts by the government to control it. All of this supports Elton's contention that parliament, from the perspective of central government, was indeed a vital means of ensuring stability and channelling grievances.

However, few studies have viewed parliament from the perspective of the local communities and governing elites who sought parliamentary solutions to their problems or even parliamentary resolutions to their disputes with others. The major exception to this has been London. Helen Miller's seminal study of London and parliament in the reign of Henry VIII and Edwin Green's on the Vintners lobby, have been recently complemented by Ian Archer's on the London lobbies in Elizabeth's reign, Claude Blair's on the Armourers lobby, and my own study of the struggle between the Curriers and Cordwainers. These not only reveal the broader context of such disputes, but emphasize that parliament was only one of many arenas available to participants. This important point has also been stressed by Robert Tittler in his study of parliament as a “point of contact” for English towns.

The dramatic collapse of the Liberal party during the second decade of the twentieth century has long fascinated academic historians, but only in the past twenty years has it become one of their major preoccupations. Every history of modern Britain now has a discussion of the causes and course of the Liberal collapse, and the specialized literature on the subject is voluminous, much of it highly technical and sophisticated.

It is easy to see why the Liberal decline appeals to historians. It has personal drama: the contest between Herbert Asquith, “the last of the Romans,” and David Lloyd George, “the Welsh Wizard.” There is the larger drama associated with the collapse of a great party and the rise of another. There are the large silent “revolutions” historians have found behind the political changes: the rise to maturity of the working classes, the evolution of British capitalism, and a vast cultural shift ushered in with the First World War.

Stephen J. Greenberg's recent article in these pages, “Dating Civil War Pamphlets, 1641–1644,” commendably calls attention to the two nearly identical manuscript catalogues that George Thomason had drawn up to catalogue his collection. Quite properly, Greenberg emphasizes the manuscript catalogues' difference from (and for some purposes, superiority to) the printed catalogue of the collection edited by G. K. Fortescue. A generation ago Lois Spencer did the same thing in two important articles on Thomason and his collection, but for lack of a follow-up, her insights have been largely ignored. Greenberg also attempted some statistical comparisons of dates of Fortescue's catalogue, Thomason's catalogue, and the Stationers' Registers.

Greenberg's study of the Thomason collection grew out of his project of discovering the time lag between the occurrence of an event and its publication in the press. While Greenberg's interest in the collection is welcome, his efforts are misleading, and in some respects, seriously flawed. My purpose here is to clarify the nature of the Thomason collection, which is still surprisingly misunderstood, and to assist other researchers in its most profitable use.

I read with great interest Michael Mendle's critique of my work in dating pamphlets from the English Civil War. Obviously, this is an area where honest men may disagree, particularly since so many of our conclusions rest upon different interpretations of an ambiguous manuscript. Nevertheless, I find that I must begin by saying that Professor Mendle has entirely missed the main purpose of my research, and has therefore misconstrued my methodology.

As I wrote in my original article, my chief concern was availability:

The demands of these questions imposed their own limitations, and pointed to their own solutions. Only two day-by-day lists of publications exist: the Thomason manuscript and the registers of the Stationers' Company. The latter is clearly insufficiently complete for the task at hand. Moreover, it is well-known that entry in the Stationers' Registers is not a guarantee of actual publication. We are left with the Thomason manuscript as a difficult but unique source for the answers that I sought.

Exactly when the two existing manuscripts were compiled is an unanswerable question. They may have been compiled, as Professor Mendle suggests, when the collection was nearly complete. They may represent a fair copy of notes that Thomason had been keeping all along. It is inescapable, however, that the manuscripts preserve the order in which Thomason obtained the tracts, and do so with far greater accuracy than either the printed British Museum catalogue or the present bound volumes.