The final phase of Venizelism (1928–1933) has traditionally been considered as a period of considerable foreign policy accomplishments (e.g. friendship treaties with Italy, Yugoslavia and Turkey). Yet despite the attention which has been paid to these agreements, the period was clearly marked by the government's drive towards internal infrastructural changes via its commitment to extensive public works programmes. This effort necessitated a huge influx of capital from abroad; in fact, in the period between 1924 and 1931 more money entered the country than at any time since 1875–90. In this context, Britain's influential role was further enhanced as a result of the indispensability of the London credit market, and her financial presence in Greece was to set the tone and pace of Anglo-Greek relations. Probably no institution reflected this uneven relation more accurately than the International Financial Commission (I.F.C).

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.

In a whimsical scene of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine enter the banquet hall only to have an invisible Faustus snatch away their dinners and, in a truly spectacular exit, scatter the banquet hall with fireworks.1 The Cardinal of Lorraine has been surrounded by fireworks for four hundred years. This is an effort to give him some peace at last.

The concern here is a symposium of quite another sort, the Colloquy of Poissy. Poissy, the last great Colloquy of the Reformation, was an attempt at religious reconciliation of Calvinist and Catholic within the framework of the Gallican Church.

The internal dissessions and upheavals in the Unionist party following the catastrophic defeat incurred at the general election of 1906 have been the subject of frequent examination by historians. Despite, or perhaps because of, the importance of the issues involved there has been general agreement that questions of policy were at the centre of this struggle. Balfour's official biographer has commented that any rumours of ‘disputed leadership’ were ‘ludicrous in the light of the correspondence that was passing in private’, while Chamberlain's biographer has asserted that he was staking ‘everything on policy’. Recently Dr Judd has suggested that Chamberlain ‘envisaged…a reunited Unionist party…very probably under his leadership not Balfour's’, but he took this analysis no further and Mr Fraser's judgement is typical that what took place was ‘a polite but ruthless struggle for the control of the Unionist party's machinery and policy’. The Birmingham leader is characteristically seen to have played through the whole episode with the straightest of bats, bound above all by personal loyalty to Balfour. Contemporaries, however, saw a different Chamberlain – one whose ruthless ambition bordered on fanaticism. Balfour noted that Chamberlain ‘cannot realize that because he is only thinking of one thing, it does not follow that every one else has the same limited intensity of vision’. Some were prepared to interpret Chamberlain's machinations in terms of a dual personality: ‘You know there are two Joes and that one honestly sees no harm in prosecuting such a manoeuvre’, but others were ready to place more sinister constructions upon them:

In most accounts of the rural uprisings of 1857 the moneylender, whether described as ‘sleek mahajan’ or ‘impassive bania’, is cast as the villain of the piece. It is he who is seen as the principal beneficiary of the landed revolution that occurred in the first half-century of British rule in the North-Western Provinces and gave the non-agricultural classes of the towns a mounting share in the control of land. And his ascendancy is attributed directly to the institutional changes effected by British rule, among the most important of which were the transformation of the immediate revenuecollecting right {malguzari) into a transferable private property; the heavy, inelastic cash assessments; and above all, the forced sale of land rights for arrears of revenue or in satisfaction of debt. ‘The public sale of land’, says Professor Chaudhuri, ‘not merely uprooted the ordinary people from their smallholdings but also destroyed the gentry of the country, and both the orders being victims of British civil law were united in the revolutionary epoch of 1857–8 in a common effort to recover what they had lost.’.

In December 1930 Sir Victor Wellesley, the deputy under secretary at the Foreign Office, and its expert on Far Eastern finance, circulated a 29-page ‘Proposal for the establishment of a Politico-Economic Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office.’ This memorandum was prompted by the growing importance of tariffs, and various forms of investment, as instruments of foreign policy, and concern at his colleagues' failure to understand the political consequences. With economic nationalism in the ascendant, Wellesley recognized that Britain soon would have to consider whether she would ‘take part in the scramble for economic hegemony’. He hoped Cabinet would decide against tariffs and imperial preference, but was worried that the Foreign Office would be ill-equipped to defend this viewpoint. It was not that the Office lacked adequate sources of economic information, but rather that the division of duties between the Department of Overseas Trade and the Foreign Office precluded their assimilation with political appreciations. Although seventy five per cent of the work of the average mission was economic or commercial, this was generally left to the commercial counsellor, who reported directly to the Department of Overseas Trade. Political dispatches were forwarded to the appropriate Foreign Office department and there examined in virtual isolation. Moreover, the dominant attitude of mind among senior diplomats was, if not actually predisposed against economic work, at least so lacking in understanding that their efforts were often misdirected.

During the eighteen months which immediately preceded the general election of 1906 many workers in Britain were adversely affected by the generally stagnant state of the economy and there was a considerable amount of agitation on behalf of the unemployed, particularly in 1905. Nevertheless, the economy began to improve in November of that year and unemployment as such did not play a very important part in the election, although the Labour candidates frequently gave it a leading place in their manifestos, putting forward a great variety of remedies. These ranged from demands for the recognition of the ‘right to work’ and the eight-hour day to pleas for the creation of a labour department with ministerial status. When Unionist candidates mentioned unemployment it was usually in the wider context of tariff reform, while Liberals who bothered to refer to the subject at all generally contented themselves with a passing reference to the need to approach the problem by reforming the land laws.

In 1581 Antoinette de La Marck, the devout duchesse de Montmorency made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin at Montserrat in Catalonia. The next year her husband Henri de Montmorency, the governor of Languedoc, corresponded with the viceroy of Catalonia about the problem of banditry which was rife on both sides of the frontier. In 1583, Montmorency's servant carried letters to Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy, hidden in the soles of his shoes. During the festivities for the wedding of Charles Emmanuel to the infanta Catalina in 1585, Giuseppe Lercaro, Montmorency's Genoese-born intendant desfinances, spent some ten days in Barcelona concealed in the lodgings of Savoy's ambassador and had several clandestine interviews with both the duke and his new father-in-law Philip II. In 1588 Philip offered 100,000 francs towards the dowry of Montmorency's daughter Charlotte, provided that she married the son of the due de Guise and thus reconciled the two families whose rivalry had dominated the French political scene since the 1540s. These incidents, unremarkable as they may individually appear, formed part of the negotiations between Henri due de Montmorency and Philip II which, in notable contrast to those of the Spanish king with the Guise family, have been little studied by historians. Consequently, Montmorency's reputation now is generally that of a politique and patriot. This paper offers a rather different appraisal of him.

In September 1579, at the height of an intense political debate over her prospective marriage to the duke of Anjou, Elizabeth I visited New Hall, the country seat of the match's greatest supporter within England, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex. Her entertainment on that occasion, hitherto completely unknown, was described in a letter, printed here, from one Norfolk gentleman, Sir Edward Clere, to another, Bassingbourne Gawdy. The letter describes the dramatic performances and other entertainments provided for the queen, which included coded but unmistakeable encouragements for her to proceed with the marriage. This article discusses the ways in which this was done and their consequences for our knowledge of the Anjou marriage debate as a political episode, suggesting that Sussex sought to use the entertainment to boost the participation of more conservative members of the nobility in government. It also explores how this evidence affects our picture of Elizabethan courtly entertainments, and particularly their non-dramatic elements. Finally, it discusses Clere's letter itself as an insight into the nature of gentry news culture, particularly with regard to matters of high politics.

This article presents a reinterpretation of John Locke's contribution to debates about the interest rate in the seventeenth century. It suggests that his argument that England should maintain the ‘natural’ rate, rather than impose a lower rate, was motivated by his theological, moral, and social conceptions of credit and its dependence on trust. In order to solve the endemic shortage of metal coin limiting the growth of monetary exchange in England, Locke stressed that the higher, ‘natural’ rate of interest would facilitate interpersonal borrowing and lending among neighbours, allowing currency to flow more freely around the country. By contrast, while he acknowledged that institutional creditors such as goldsmith-bankers could quicken the circulation of money by issuing debt instruments like bills of exchange, he saw institutional credit as a threat to the moral community. Not only did he question how people could rationally trust financiers without any epistemic apprehension of their personal probity, but he moreover doubted whether individuals accumulating so much money were likely to act trustworthily. Finally, using an otherwise unstudied dialogue about the Bank of England, this article argues Locke extended his criticisms about the threats posted by private banks to the country's nascent system of public credit.

Both the Entente and the Central Powers interpreted the ascension of Benedict XV to the papal throne in the fall of 1914 as signalling a reinvigoration of Vatican foreign policy. Indeed there was little reason to expect that Giacomo Delia Chiesa, elected successor to Pius X on the morning of 3 September, would be passive in a diplomatic sense. As Rennell Rodd, the British ambassador to the Italian court remarked a few days after Benedict's election, the new Pontiff's first acts gave promise of prefacing a ‘vigorous and interesting reign.’.