There exists in the British Museum a copy of the prayer book of 1559 bearing the signature of Sir Nicholas Bacon. It would be reasonable to infer that the book was once the lord keeper's property, but a pleasing fancy to pretend that he autographed it for a friend and well-wisher. He was not the author of this all but final recension of the Anglican liturgy but he was one of its principal sponsors. For in the words of Ralph Churton,’the business of that important parliament… in which the acts of uniformity and supremacy for the settlement of religion were passed was principally managed by the Lord Keeper Bacon’. It was Bacon who presided, not only in the House of Lords but over the theological disputation in Westminster Hall which was staged as a public signal that the English Church was to be once more reformed according to the protestant model. In a speech at the conclusion of the 1559 parliament he defended the newly made settlement against opponents and detractors, and in so doing scratched in the sand, as it were, the line of the Anglican via media:’Amongst thease I meane to comprehende aswell those that be to swifte as those that be to slowe, those I say that goe before the lawe or beyond the lawe as those that will not followe.’

South Wales and the border counties played a crucial part in the events known as the ‘Popish plot’. The alleged catholic conspiracy laid particular emphasis on the roles allotted to Welsh magnates like Worcester and Powis, with their neighbours and dependants, and invasion plans were said to hinge on strategic centres like Chepstow castle and Milford Haven. Men from this area were active in the’plot’, whether as informers - notably Bedloe - or as parliamentary opponents of the duke of York; Welsh Jesuits were supposedly involved in the main conspiracies and murders, and Border protestants like Bishop Croft were among their main targets. John Arnold of Monmouthshire even aspired to the position in the whig leadership held by Shaftesbury, and the tory Ailesbury regarded the worst villains of the whole ‘plot’ as Arnold himself and his Herefordshire kinsman John Dutton Colt. It was also in this area that the ‘plot’ was at its most violent, and Professor Kenyon's study of the Popish plot rightly refers to ‘this battle area on the frontier of Wale’. ‘The main damage suffered outside London’ by the Jesuits was the loss of the south Wales district headquarters at the Cwm, when this was raided in 1678 by Croft, Arnold, and another ultra-protestant named Charles Price: ‘ the south Wales mission was the only one completely eliminated’. In 1679 a Jesuit wrote from north Wales that’ the college of South Wales was totally rooted up. We of the north have fared a little better, thus far; but God knows how long it is to last, for we live in constant fears and perils, only three of us now remaining’.

England has not known a simple two-party system, or a party system of any sort. The lineage of English parties is fragmented and discontinuous. Most of the apparent continuities, like the myth of a long-standing two-party system, have been invented in retrospect by politicians and publicists seeking the justification of a pedigree. Party itself has not been a constant phenomenon, which could be defined by the political scientist and then searched for by the historian. The English experience, rather, is of a succession of discontinuous two-, three-, even four-party systems whose components both develop and relate to each other through changing conventions. Often the fiction of the ‘two-party system’ has disguised the reality of three or more parties; parties which, themselves, can be the vehicles for a wide range of issues. It is a commonplace, which was evident to Hume and Bolingbroke, that whigs and tories exchanged many of their policy commitments in the early eighteenth century; but the same suggestion has been made of the Conservative and Labour parties today. The content of a party's programme has always been almost infinitely flexible; except in respect of the questions raised by a small number of threats, challenges or problems. The existence and endurance of party systems has usually articulated the ideological polarity which such challenges induce.

One of the recurrent challenges to the historian of the French Revolution is that of interpreting the transition from the liberalism of its early years to the centralized dictatorship of the Terror. Why did the constitution of 1791, that remarkable legislative achievement which stood for so long as a model to nineteenth-century liberal reformers, collapse within a year of its enactment? How did the individual and political liberties guaranteed by that constitution become submerged so rapidly under the flood of repressive legislation during the Year II? What made the impressive façade of the annus mirabilis of 1790 crumble into political dissension from the summer of 1791 onwards, revealing the stark realities of religious conflict, war, insurrection and civil strife? Whether one regards this transition as the unfortunate consequence of a succession of political accidents or as the inevitable result of deeply rooted social conflict, the role of Jacobinism in the process is fundamental, for it provided both the personnel and the ideology that was to dominate political life throughout the Terror. As Michelet was one of the first to point out, Jacobinism underwent several transformations during the five years of its existence as a formal political movement, moving decisively to the left after the secession of the Feuillants in July 1791 and again with the expulsion of the leading Girondins in the following autumn, until it reached its final and most characteristic stage only at the height of the Terror, during Year II.

Some years ago in this journal, Oliver MacDonagh suggested a general framework for the study of administrative growth and change in nineteenth century Britain. The chief significance of this work is that it views the transformation of executive government as ‘a genuine historical process’. In the peculiar circumstances of the nineteenth century, he argues, administration was’ creative and self-generating’ in the sense that its functional and structural elaboration operated ‘beyond the control or comprehension of anyone in particular’. To this extent, administrative development is depicted as having remained remarkably free from the influence of ‘external forces’, while breeding and feeding off its own internal momentum.

The word hero cannot be defined simply. According to time and speaker, it can imply anything from the bravery of a moment to the courage and statesmanship of a lifetime. We do not enjoy the distinction in English which La Bruyère drew in French: to him un héros was a young, dauntless and venturesome man, one like Alexander; but against him had to be set the truly great man, the grand homme, the one with judgement, foresight, experience and considerable ability - a man like Caesar. As we shall see, hero can be used to describe both kinds of men. But if it has no very specific meaning, it is an important word for any study of the Victorian era - an era that for our purposes is taken to cover the years from the 1830s to the outbreak of the First World War. For the Victorians loved a hero, and the word often came to their lips. Carlyle, whose Heroes and hero-worship was first published in 1841, thought that a nation's whole history could be told in terms of its heroes, and he and Kingsley and Froude, to name three of the important literary figures of the age, regarded heroes as being vital to any society. They thought it particularly important that the new burgeoning industrial society should have heroes of its own, and that these should act as beacons and as examples. As Froude said in Representative men (1850), ‘the only education worth anything is the education of character, and we cannot educate a character unless we have some notion of what we would form’.

It may be thought surprising that one should attempt to reassess the 1945 general election, in view of the attention which has already been paid to it. The election was, as is well known, the subject of the first of the Nuffield election surveys, which have continued thereafter to the present day; and although that book, unlike more recent Nuffield studies, contained no account of the politics of the period preceding the election, such accounts have appeared in more recent years, most notably, perhaps that by Dr Paul Addison entitled The road to 1945. Addison’s work, however, full though it is on the politics of wartime, stops short at the election itself; and the Nuffield study, being the first of its series, was also, it is fair to say, the crudest and least adequate – although when it was published it marked an enormous technical advance on any previous rapid study of a British general election.