The states of sixteenth-century Europe fell into two financial groups. France and Spain, in a class of their own, enjoyed an apparently total freedom for much of the time from the normal constraints, and this in spite of their rapidly escalating debts. The other European states which made up the second category were compelled to observe far more stringent controls. The distinction between the two groups was further underlined by the question of credit. Although the Habsburg and Valois monarchs spent in a way that was both financially reckless and socially unpitying, the moneyed classes were only too eager to advance additional funds. Repeated, and sometimes spectacular, failures seemed rarely to have damped their enthusiasm. The smaller states seldom found such ease of access to credit. For most of the time they were obliged to maintain a semblance of order by sustained and sordid frugality - the bilking of minor creditors, the levying of dubious ‘loans’, or the dissipation of capital. While no strangers to these devices, France and Spain were able to operate for prolonged periods free from ordinary limitations. But even for these privileged beings the moment of truth eventually arrived. Resources were finite; and even an imperial state could exhaust the credit, if not the credulity, of its principal bankers. Such an intrusion of reality took the form of a public bankruptcy.

For the last two centuries Edward Gibbon has been regarded—either favourably or disparagingly - as the Enlightenment's greatest celebrant of the ‘triumph of human reason’. He has been almost invariably portrayed as an essentially optimistic believer in rational man's potential for social progress and moral advancement. Much of Gibbon's modern reputation as the Enlightenment's historian par excellence is due to early and widespread acceptance of certain assumptions about his religious sentiments. There has been a strong tendency to assume that Gibbon stood in the vanguard of what Peter Gay has called ‘modern paganism’: ‘The French philosophes and British infidels like Hume or Gibbon rejected revealed religion so vehemently and so completely that the Christian contribution to their ideas was modest and subterranean; they were usually unaware of it’. Gibbon has been traditionally seen as a vocal deist, while the account of the rise and consolidation of the Christian church contained within The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (1776–88) has often been thought intrinsically anti-christian.

It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India, which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of men's life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.

Gladstone has not been well served by the historiographical tradition dominant for much of this century. It has disseminated an image of him that emphasizes little more than an undefined ‘reformism’ and a moralizing populism; this is as unhelpful and distorted as is the interpretation, emanating from the same source, of much of the rest of nineteenth-century politics. It is no longer enough to judge public figures of this period by the degree of their commitment to nebulous platitudes like ‘social reform’ or ‘progress’: historians have recently exposed the flimsy foundations that sustain the reputations of even those most frequently celebrated in these spheres. It is misleading to concentrate attention on the development of institutional reform, centralized government, trade union legislation, or welfare statutes for the poor; franchise extension apart, advances here were often provoked solely by bureaucratic agency or by the concern of philanthropic backbenchers, and contributed only occasionally to the major disputes of Victorian political society. If we are to shed light on the domestic issues of vital importance to contemporary politicians, we need a far more coherent account than is now available of financial, taxation and land policy on the one hand, and, on the other, of the main subject of this article, the role of religion in politics.

During the period from the Reform Act of 1832 to the early 1880s, when a change set in, the house of lords was perceptibly weaker than the house of commons. The prevailing view of its position, accepted for the most part even by the peers themselves, was expressed in Walter Bagehot's highly influential English constitution (1867, rev. 1872), where the house of lords is described as safe from rough destruction but not from inner decay, the danger coming not so much from assassination as atrophy, not from abolition but decline. This description drew on Bagehot's distinction between the dignified and efficient parts of the constitution. The house of lords belonged to the first category: that house in its dignified capacity inspired a reverence in the people that attached them to the government. Yet, paradoxically, in view of the great respect for the aristocracy, the house of lords had been subordinate as a legislative chamber to the house of commons even before the Reform Act of 1832; and since then this subordination had grown ever more pronounced.

In his autobiography, Joseph Arch recalled a trial which had taken place in Bedford in 1875, and which had caused much local dissatisfaction:

Samuel Dawson, a farm labourer aged fifty-seven, whose wages averaged twelve shillings a week, was sent to Bedford gaol for two months with hard labour…because he could not pay one shilling a week towards the maintenance of his parents… It was a cruel business and it touched scores and scores of labourers on the raw^-fof'this question of maintaining parents was a burning one.

In spite of occasional protests Lord Beaverbrook's narrative of British domestic politics during the first world war seems to retain the authority of a primary source. This is particularly true of the passages in Politicians and the war, 1914–1916 which cover the events in which he, then Sir Max Aitken, claimed to have taken an influential part. Mr A. J. P. Taylor in his appraisal of Beaverbrook's second volume covering the fall of Asquith in 1916 declares: ‘ It provides essential testimony for events during a great political crisis — perhaps the most detailed account of such a crisis ever written from the inside... The narrative is carried along by rare zest and wit, yet with the detached impartiality of the true scholar. ‘ Beaverbrook's apparent advantages might well seem conclusive. He was a contemporary agent as well as observer, summed up in his jaunty ‘ I was there!’. He was supposed to have enjoyed the complete confidence of Bonar Law, to have run a newspaper and to have kept a diary. An M.P. and virtual parliamentary private secretary to Bonar Law, whose rise to the Commons party leadership he appeared to have engineered, Aitken could be presumed to be politically on the ‘inside’. A tycoon of Canadian business ‘mergers’ and a self-made millionaire at a young age, he was esteemed by Law to be one of the cleverest men he knew.

Not the least significant constitutional difference between Britain and many continental states in the nineteenth century lay in the sphere of formal arrangements for the exercise of power during civil emergencies. Britain had no clearly understood concept of notrecht or of 'state of siege’. This omission certainly reflected the absence of foreign invasion as much as the feebleness of domestic revolutionary threats. Internal emergencies occurred, indeed, with a frequency hard to square with the old Whig interpretation; but while they often alarmed the authorities, none of them proved so formidable as not to be amenable to control by the civil power backed up by fairly small numbers of troops. A good deal of emergency legislation was passed until the 1820s, but thereafter a marked decline in the incidence and severity of violent disturbance, and in the violence of the government's responses, set in. The threat of revolution in Britain itself, in so far as it had ever existed, had faded. The terrible uncertainties revealed by the 1831 Bristol riots could be optimistically put aside: magistrates could get by with ‘reading the Riot Act’ and trusting to luck, and perhaps a few dragoons or yeomanry.