It is commonly thought that one of the ways in which Protector Somerset expressed his idealistic consideration for the lower orders was by his involvement with a court of requests - either a private court supposedly established in his own house, or the official court of requests - which he used not merely to safeguard against injustice but also to implement social views out of keeping with the aristocratic assumptions of the age, particularly in the interests of agrarian reform. This paper examines the evidence for the existence of a private court and for Somerset's connexion with the official court. Its aim is to question the persisting view, to redefine the Protector's social concerns and to illuminate the operation of Requests in the early years of Edward VI's reign.

The measure of 1723 known as the ‘Waldiam Black Act’ (9 Geo. I, c. 22) has acquired a lasting notoriety. Lecky called it ‘a special and most sanguinary law’, and even Sir Leon Radzinowicz finds it ‘remarkable’ as the most severe legislation of the eighteenth century, its comprehensive nature making it an ‘ideological index’ to the capital laws at large. The Act was extended for five years in 1725 (12 Geo. I, c. 30), amended in 1754 (27 Geo. II, c. 15) and made permanent in 1758 (31 Geo. II, c. 42). Effectively it survived for a century, until Peel took it off the statute book despite opposition from the Quarterly Review. Its main provisions were directed against ‘wicked and evil-disposed Persons going armed in Disguise, and doing Injuries and Violences to die Persons and Properties of his Majesty's Subjects’. It became a felony without benefit of clergy to go abroad into woods in any form of disguise or with a blackened face. Commission of a specific act of destruction or larceny was not necessary for a prosecution to lie.

Since the publication in 1952 of the first volume of V. T. Harlow's The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, the debate on the nature and concept of empire in the twenty years after the American war of independence has focused on the questions of motivation and direction in imperial expansion. Harlow himself established the terms of the debate. The hiatus which traditional historiography had established in colonial affairs as a consequence of American independence, was swept away to be replaced with a set of themes appropriate to an empire which was undergoing continuous change after the Seven Years War. Two of these diemes in particular have caught the imagination of historians. As trouble and disenchantment spread in the colonies across the Atlantic, there was a marked swing in imperial direction towards die east – to Asia and the Pacific – where the second empire was to have its core. But the change was not only one of direction. The new empire reflected a revulsion against colonization and a clear preference for trade over dominion.

One of the central problems that needs careful analysis and explanation by any historian of the revolutions of 1848 is that of the failure throughout Europe of the predominantly urban, middle-class revolutionary governments to secure tiie support of the peasant masses. With the notable exception of die alliance that Kossuth formed between Magyar peasants and gentry, which resulted in die heroic resistance of the Hungarians until late in 1849, there seems little evidence of die peasantry being won wholeheartedly to die revolution. In fact, far from a repetition of the Jacobin model of 1793–4, the more familiar pattern emerges of counter-revolutionary armies, composed largely of peasantry, destroying die urban revolutions. Peasants from every part of Europe made up the armies of Windischgrätz, Radetzky, Haynau and Paskievitsch which crushed Prague, Milan, Vienna, Budapest and ultimately Venice. Little or no support came from the German countryside for the dying Frankfurt Assembly in the spring of 1849; and, in the rather different conditions of France, the ballot box army from the rural areas in April and December 1848 dealt fatal blows to the aspirations of the Parisian revolution. In most of the great cities of Europe, the middle class had some limited measure of success in gaining and keeping the urban poor on their side. It was this alliance, after all, between the advanced sections of the bourgeoisie and the rapidly expanding lower classes of the cities, that was principally responsible for the toppling of so many of the Restoration governments in February and March 1848. But in a largely pre-industrial society, as Europe was at this time, the peasantry still formed the vast mass of the population, and could rightly be seen to be the arbiters of the bourgeois revolution.

On 11 January 1910 Lord Esher, a permanent non-government member of the Committee of Imperial Defence and a close confidant of King Edward VII, dispatched these encouraging words to a relatively unknown journalist: ‘Your book can be as epoch making as Seeley's Expansion of England or Mahan's Sea Power. It is sent forth at the right psychological moment, and wants to be followed up.’ The recipient of the letter, a Mr Ralph Lane (better known under the pseudonym of Norman Angell), had just begun to receive recognition for his small monograph, Europe's Optical Illusion, later revised and expanded into its more celebrated version, The Great Illusion. Esher's words were prophetic. The Great Illusion ran into numerous editions: it sold over two million copies from 1910 to 1913, in 1939 over half a million, and was translated into twenty-five languages.

In the January 1916 issue of the Nineteenth Century the Reverend Robert H. Murray contributed the first of two articles on Irish insurrectionary movements during the wars with France at the end of the eighteenth century. He prefaced his text with some homilies directed at the British government of his ow n time:

During the early months of the present War the prospects of the invasion of these islands by sea as well as by air were discussed and prepared for by naval and military authorities. As the struggle developed month by month there has been less discussion of such contingencies. The magnificent work of our Fleet has lulled us into a complete sense of security. We do not foresee an attack upon the East Coast of England: we have almost forgotten our fears with regard to the West Coast of Ireland.

The Spanish Civil War, as Stanley Payne has recently pointed out, was also a civil war between Spanish Basques. On the side of the Spanish Republic was the tiny and shortlived Basque Republic of Euzkadi, limited to the coastal provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa where Basque Nationalism had its stronghold; on that of the insurgents were the inland provinces of Álava and Navarre, dominated politically by the ultra-conservative, monarchist and rabidly Catholic Carlists. In a war notorious for the bitterness of its fighting, some of the most bitter took place along the front formed by the Basque mountains, now a political as well as a physical barrier dividing the Basque country. Basque Carlists seized in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa were imprisoned and executed as enemies of Euzkadi; in Navarre and Álava, Basque Nationalists met a similar fate as traitors to Spain; and when Guipúzcoa was overrun by a predominantly Carlist invading army from Navarre, it was treated as conquered and occupied territory, part of its area actually being claimed for a Navarrese ‘corridor’ to the sea.