Dr Elton has now written at length (Historical J. I (1958), 21–39) to support his view that Henry VII's reputation for rapacity was undeserved, while the idea that this ‘policy turned from just to unjust exactions was based only on insufficient knowledge of the facts’. He may have shown that Henry's actions were legal; he has not shown that they were just.What is unpopular is not necessarily unjust, but the opinions of subjects merit as full and sympathetic treatment as the policies of kings. Dr Elton's argument is of a type with those which claimed that, since Hitler's was a legally constituted government, it was sentimental to complain that its persecution of the Jews was unjust.

There is a sense in which all naval history is general history, since the structure and preoccupations of a State influence both the services which it demands of its fleets and the type of naval organization appropriate to their performance. This relationship is most obvious in periods of social and political revolution when the navy, like other institutions, finds itself out of harmony with the principles of the new order. Such a situation arose in France in 1789 when the Constituent Assembly set about the transformation of so many aspects of French society. The study of naval politics in the period 1789–91 consequently helps towards a fuller understanding of the Revolution as a whole. The changes introduced into the French navy form a not unimportant part of the general reconstruction of France while the debates on naval policy often throw a revealing light on the political attitudes of the protagonists.

It was the fortune of Thomas Babington Macaulay to be born into a chaotic world; to grow to manhood amidst constant wars, revolutions, counterrevolutions and reform movements scarcely distinguishable from revolutions; to take a leading part in some of these movements at home and in India, and to be an eye-witness of others in France; to live long enough to see the gradual return of stability on a foundation holding out the brightest hopes for the future, and to die early enough to escape even the first faint indication that these hopes were not to be fulfilled. He was born (on the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt, as he loved to recall) between the fall of the republic in France and the rise of Napoleon to despotic authority. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, with which he and his family were to have so long and so distinguished an association, between the battle of Waterloo and the battle of Peterloo. He attained his majority amidst the revolutions of 1821, entered Parliament amidst the revolutions of 1830, and published the first two volumes of his History amidst the revolutions of 1848. He was still at the height of his powers when the Great Exhibition of 1851 was hailed as ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity, and died eight years later, just in time to avoid witnessing the series of wars which marked the third quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of that bitter commercial rivalry and international tension which foreshadowed the eventual collapse.

In 1868 the Birmingham Liberal Association won the first of a series of dazzling victories in parliamentary and municipal elections. Contemporaries immediately recognized the presence of a new phenomenon in English politics: disciplined control of a mass electorate by a tightly organized party apparatus. At first glance the Liberal machine seemed un-English, and the Tories gleefully imported an American epithet to describe it. The traditional interpretation of the caucus, as set forth by Ostrogorski, followed contemporary opinion in emphasizing the novelty of the institution. In his view, ‘the organization of the electoral masses’ by the Liberal Association represented a sharp break with the past. He traced its origin to the minority clause of the Reform Act of 1867, which gave each Birmingham elector two votes to divide among the candidates for three seats, thus challenging the Liberals to develop an organization capable of circumventing the Act. After their success in the ‘vote as you are told’ election of 1868, the Liberal politicians, according to Ostrogorski, continued to use the caucus as a contrivance for manipulating an electorate that otherwise might have exercised independent judgment. This interpretation remains of considerable value, particularly in its treatment of the oligarchic implications of modern democracy. Nevertheless, Ostrogorski’s analysis tends to be misleading and one-sided. The Liberal politicians, like the priests in Voltaire’s account of the history of religion, are depicted as consciously constructing an institution ex nihilo to meet their own needs and purposes. Ostrogorski attributes too much to calculation and too little to the historical process that created the materials out of which the caucus was built and the foundations on which it rested.