In the year 1582 William Camden the antiquary was about to venture into a remote country beyond the mountains, called Lancashire, ‘which’, he wrote, ‘I go unto (God speed me well) after a sort somewhat against my will…but I will proceed, in hope that God's assistance, which hitherto hath been favour-able unto me, will not now fail me'. Such qualms might well assail any professional historian who plans an expedition into Shakespeare country; for the trail is marked by his predecessors’ whitening bones and, in one case, by bones which the vultures have not finished picking clean.

The writing of ecclesiastical history is rarely disinterested, and this was especially so in eighteenth-century England. Its leading practitioner, John Jortin, wrote with a clear, determined, and dynamic purpose: to offer an effective critique of orthodoxy and its ally, persecution, and to secure civil and religious liberty in a way commensurate with maintaining an established church and liberal learning. His life and writings meditated on early eighteenth-century tendencies in thought and scholarship in a spirit that allowed often radical developments to take place. Unambiguously heterodox in tone and conclusions, Jortin's researches were drawn on by radical dissent. A scion of a Huguenot family, Jortin was a critical mediator between the culture of the Huguenot Refuge and English scholarship. He was a pioneer in the study of English literature, moving such study away from the narrowly philological methods of Richard Bentley towards more reflective literary scholarship. Above all, Jortin was determined that the Republic of Letters should be a Christian Republic; his contribution to and experience of Enlightenment substantiates J. G. A. Pocock's contention that, in England, it was largely clerical and conservative: study of Jortin in context challenges the hegemony of the Radical Enlightenment thesis that is rapidly becoming an interpretative orthodoxy.

Until 1793, the judicial policy of the Company's Government in Bengal was guided only by expediency and tradition. The tradition was that of the Moghul government which entrusted the management of civil justice to the Executive and those in charge of collection of revenue; 1 and the expediency—that of discharging the responsibilities of the Diwani with as little spending from the profits as possible. This is clearly visible in Warren Hastings's administrative arrangements of 1772 under which the civil judiciary in the mofussil was consigned to the District Collectors of revenue. With few interruptions marked by Hastings's administrative experiments,2 the practice of keeping the revenue and judicial functions united continued for the following twenty years. In 1790, when for the first time the Company took over the administration of criminal justice, the District Magistracy was also vested with the Collector. He thus became the Judge, Magistrate and Collector, all in one. This ‵single officers′ plan for the Districts had been advocated by Sir John Shore as being in conformity with the tradition with the Indians looking up to a single despotic authority for the redress of all their grievances,3 and had found favour with the Directors4 for the economy involved.

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.

During the War of American Independence, the Treasury Board contracted for a wide range of army supplies. Opposition, both in parliament and the press, persistendy criticized the methods employed in the allocation of contracts. It was widely believed that contracts were awarded in the interests of ministerial influence, not public economy; contractors were the friends of government and enjoyed excessive profits. The most frequendy proposed alternative was to contract through public advertisement and accept the lowest tender received. This method was normally referred to as open contracting. Isaac Barre was the main opposition spokesman on matters relating to army supplies and it was his view, expressed in the House during April 1778, that ‘contracts ought to be open, and offered to the lowest bidder'. Government spokesmen and contractors sitting in the House regularly countered this argument with the assertion that open contracts’ would be prejudicial to the public service. Men inadequate to the accomplishment of the contracts, would at all times bid lower than men of ability and reputation, and they would do much more injury by serving the public badly, than the difference of expense. 'Although neither Lord North nor John Robinson, the Treasury Secretary mainly responsible for contract business, were fully satisfied with existing contract methods, they sought economies within those methods and even the Shelburne ministry, when it radically altered the contracting system for supplying the army in America in 1782, decided against the open contracts championed by friends of Shelburne when in opposition.

The events of 1857 etched themselves deeply into the consciousness of the British in India. Throughout the remaining years of British rule the lessons of the Mutiny were never forgotten; indeed they provided the constant backdrop against which British policy was enacted. To a large extent this experience played a decisive role in recasting the whole direction of British policy. Its impact on policy toward the native Indian states was sharp, and lasting in its effects. Canning realized that the native states were ‘break-waters to the storm which would otherwise have swept over us in one great wave’, and he henceforward, by his grant of the right of adoption, committed Britain to their maintenance.1 This post-Mutiny solicitude for the native states stands in obvious contrast with the deprecatory, if not avowedly annexationist, policy of Canning's predecessors.

David Lloyd George's behaviour in the crucial week between 27 July and 3 August 1914 has commanded much scholarship and more speculation. Nearly every member of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's Liberal cabinet, including the chancellor of the exchequer himself, has told the story of those agonizing days, by memoir, diary or letter. Yet Lloyd George's part in Britain's decision to declare war upon Germany on 4 August remains unclear; indeed it is less clear now than it seemed to be half a century ago. How could the ‘Pro-Boer’ of the days of the South African war, who had been the object of any number of dangerous personal assaults for his treasonable speeches, the enemy of the dreadnoughts, the slasher of naval estimates, indeed the man who most recently declared at the Mansion House and had asserted again in the House of Commons only six days later – the last coming on the day of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia – that powerful commercial influences in Germany and Britain were drawing the two nations so close that great arms were unnecessary, how could such a man become the supporter of intervention in a continental war on behalf of France?

The focus of this article is upon the extensive debate in France that surrounded the concept, content and application of the rights of man in the years between 1789 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Beginning with a detailed analysis of the discussion that surrounded the formulation of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen attention turns to two broad strands of criticism directed at the discourse of rights: that articulated by the defenders of counter-revolution (most notably Montlosier, Rivarol and de Bonald) and that associated with the idéologues (Daunou, Roederer and de Tracy). Amongst the former rights were associated not only with a new species of revolutionary government but also with the political, social and moral disintegration of France itself; for the latter, emphasis, via the logic of utilitarianism, fell upon seeking to deprive the language of rights of its radical dimensions and implications. It was left to Benjamin Constant to point out the possible contradictions between the claims of utility and those of rights.

The mutual antipathy which arose between Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson during the First World War is often acknowledged to the point of exaggeration. Historians have however done little more than to note its presence and attempt to minimize its importance to the party's development; they have rarely sought to investigate its causes. During the war the strains in their relationship lay not in any long-standing personal mistrust and cannot be explained by Henderson's acceptance of office in the Asquith and Lloyd George coalitions or MacDonald's unremitting opposition to government policy. They lay in the fact that both men believed the other to have abandoned the Labour party in its hour of crisis. That crisis occurred between August and October 1914 in the first instance and this article will argue that the debate over the future of the Labour party and of the trade union movement which occurred during that period, rather than concern for the fate of the nation, determined the decisions taken by MacDonald and Henderson, by the parliamentary Labour party (P.L.P.), and by the wider Labour movement in the first months of war.

Over the last two decades, noticeable progress has been made towards a more complete understanding of the political dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany. The older emphasis on the ‘high politics’ of Bismarck and his successors has given way to a much more differentiated picture of a political system in constant flux as it attempted to cope with the complexities of a rapidly industrializing society. Old orthodoxies concerning the weakness of German liberalism have been subjected to new examination and scholars have become increasingly aware of the potential of powerful interest groups to challenge as well as to buttress the Establishment. The overall effect of this general advance in the historiography of the Second Empire has been to direct attention away from the motives of individual decision-makers, at least at the ‘high-political’ level, and to investigate the structural constraints on the formulation of policy. Despite certain recent attempts to reinstate a more personalistic approach, it seems clear that no future history of late nineteenth-century German politics can afford to neglect these developments.

In his volume in the Oxford History of England, R. C. K. Ensor gave us the first scholarly and dispassionate account of the reforms which Edward Cardwell made in the British army between 1868 and 1874. Ensor consciously followed Gladstone, who called Cardwell the greatest war secretary since die era of die Napoleonic wars. Ever since Ensor wrote, it has been impossible to do what Fortescue, the army's historian, did when he wrote whole chapters on the army after the Crimean War without once mentioning the name of Cardwell. Among more recent scholars diere has been a good deal of writing around the subject of the Cardwell reforms widiout actually attacking them head-on. We have a brief biography of Cardwell which quotes at some length from his correspondence, and we have a description of the purchase system in the army. There have been studies of a part of the background of the Cardwell era, and of die working-out of the reforms in the army of the 1870s and 1880s. Two recent works have been rather critical of the value of Cardwell's work.

The Afghan war blue books of 1839 have usually been regarded as classic examples of the way official documents can be mutilated by skilful and unscrupulous editing almost to the point of forgery. Sir William Kaye's monumental and authoritative history of the first Afghan war, published in 1851, contains this crushing indictment:

I cannot, indeed, suppress the utterance of my abhorrence of this system of grabling the official correspondece of public men-sending the letters of a statesman or diplomatist into the world mutilated, emasculated-the very pith and substance of them cut is palmed upon the world has not one redeeming feature.