Even though so much has so often been done, the study of parliament remains active, not least so for the sixteenth century. A fresh look at the present state of the question seems appropriate on this occasion when we are assembled to commemorate Sir John Neale, the foremost historian of the Tudor House of Commons. It is now nearly twenty years since Neale completed his life's work, and those twenty years have not been without further study and thought, sometimes assisted by the discovery of new evidence. No one, we may be sure, would have been better pleased than today's honorand to find that what so fully engaged his interest and his labours should continue to attract his successors – to know that he had not closed a book but opened a window.

The Roll of Parliament, supposedly the master record of that institution, actually occupied that place until some time in the sixteenth century. Yet it has never been systematically studied for the period after parliament had institutionally emerged in the middle of the fourteenth century. Since the rolls down to 1504 and for several of the parliaments of Henry VIII have been in print for some 200 years, their contents have been used often enough; but no one has subjected the originals to scrutiny, so that the documents themselves have not been made to tell what they can. This paper will consider the rolls for the years 1449–1547, the period covered by the extant early journals of the house of lords which have already been analysed. The manuscripts reveal that the print hides many interesting features, but since the texts as printed are sound enough it will at times be convenient to use them for purposes of reference.

In the history of Renaissance thought and learning jurisprudence seems to be a missing term. Not that the scholarship of civil, canon and customary law is itself lacking, or lagging, but it has not been sufficiently integrated with that of other fields, and even in the modern history of the Renaissance ‘encyclopedia’ it does not hold high priority. In some modern views of the studium, in fact, law seems to stand not only below the trivium and quadrivium but even, since it lacks utility as well as liberality, below the mechanical arts. Petrarch and other humanists would no doubt be pleased at this turnabout; and others may find justice (in a historian's if not a lawyer's sense) at the fall of the profession of law from academic grace. For present purposes, however, we must try to lay aside the prejudice which many of us may feel toward lawyers, modern counterparts of the pedants derided by Petrarch and the ‘mean and mercenary’ pettifoggers denounced by Cicero. It is not the purpose here to plead the cause of Renaissance jurists; but it may be possible, by attending to some of their less celebrated (or lamented) achievements, to do some justice to their place in the history of learning.

The reform of crown finances was one of the most urgent and complex problems facing the English government in the second half of Edward VI's reign. As one aspect of the general regeneration of the financial system the crown appointed in 1552 a royal commission to study the state of the revenue courts. This was only one in a long series of temporary commissions established in the mid-sixteenth century to examine various aspects of the crown revenue and its administration. However, several features of this commission set it apart from similar initiatives. It was probably the most comprehensive and thorough investigation performed during this period, and the commission's findings represent the sole surviving detailed analysis of the mid-Tudor revenue system. Moreover, the commissioners went beyond a survey of the courts to make explicit recommendations for reform which have traditionally been linked to the reorganization of the royal finances in 1553–4. Although the commission's report has recently been published, both this document and the agency which produced it have hitherto escaped the detailed analysis which they well deserve and which is essential for an assessment of the report's significance.

Compared to the rather large corpus of modern writing on puritan political and socio-economic opinions, very little has reached print concerning early-seventeenth-century puritan views on the intellect and the proper uses of reason. Much of what does exist is concerned primarily with the question of a connexion between puritanism and the ‘rise of science’ or the development of a learned mentality more interested in discovery than in repetition. Debate over the connexion has centred on the role of puritanism as a catalytic philosophy which drove men to cast off the bonds of ancient (classical) wisdom and search God's handiwork for further clues to the identity of the Master himself and his providence for the world. Most argument has relied on parading puritans who were, or were not, supporters of scientific endeavour. The evidence has, in the main, been highly selective. There has been very little consideration of the intellectual background of puritanism as a school of thought. Most of the evidence, too, has been taken from the years of the Revolution, when the meaning of the term ‘puritan’ was very different from what it had been eighty, or even thirty, years earlier. This article seeks to correct both these problems of methodology and interpretation by considering puritanism as a set of ideas which could lead to but one intellectual conclusion. It is the contention here that the argument that puritanism offered incentive and support to the ‘new learning’ cannot be supported from the evidence drawn from an examination of early-seventeenth-century puritan writers.

The English Revolution began in the summer of 1647. It was a struggle to delimit power and authority which neither the constitutional reforms of 1641 nor the civil war that followed had been able to resolve. Shortly after the fighting ceased in 1646 the House of Lords propounded that ‘things that are to be perpetual might be settled in the old way, by the three estates’. Unexpectedly, however, it was conservative ‘presbyterian’ members of the House of Commons who conducted an experiment in government without the king. In the winter of 1646 Denzil Holies succeeded in obtaining sufficient personal support and institutional power to coordinate and implement a political programme. But the inability of the men at Westminster collectively to secure an accord with the king had encouraged some to question parliament's intentions and others its integrity. Moreover, Charles's defeat, flight to the Scots, and subsequent imprisonment revived the long deferred examination of sovereignty. This now centred on parliament, whose good intentions were, nevertheless, an insufficient justification for its rule. Beginning in the winter of 1646 and building to a climax in the summer of 1647, an assault mounted from both left and right struck at the conduct of Holles and his ‘faction’ and then at the foundation of parliament's role as a conservator of order and authority.

Who became protestant in sixteenth-century France? This question has long exercised historians. A contemporary, La Popelinière, himself a huguenot, pointed to the varied attractions of the reformation for the politically ambitious and for the socially and economically underprivileged. Moving on to the beginning of this century, Henri Hauser postulated a protestantism dominated by artisans and the lower urban classes, although he later emphasised the appeal of the new religion to all social groups, a point of view endorsed by Lucien Romier and E. G. Léonard. Despite the political and military significance of the adherence of both some high court nobles and lesser rural hobereaux, it is nevertheless clear that Calvinism was predominantly and intentionally an urban phenomenon; Genevan missionaries were directed primarily to the cities and towns, though there were some notable exceptions such as the Cévennes area in southern France. It is, however, possible to advance from these rather cautious generalizations and to ask whether the social and economic profile of those who converted to Calvinism reflects that of the French people as a whole or whether there is some special relationship between status and religion, and whether there is any regional differentiation. Some of the answers, which in the current state of research must remain tentative, may be drawn from lists of huguenots drawn up by judicial and municipal authorities in the course of the civil wars. These lists provide, as Jean Delumeau has recently pointed out, a marvellous introduction to the sociology of French protestantism and indeed, one of the few ways of approaching the issue. Very few registers of the état-civil of protestant churches survive from the sixteenth century and those that do often fail to note occupational status. Lists of refugees in Geneva and elsewhere offer some evidence from a protestant point of view, but are distorted by a number of factors and may be unreliable in respect of geographical distribution and occupations.

‘Supremacy and Uniformity’, wrote A. F. Pollard, ‘occupied less of the time of parliament [in 1559] … than did the scramble for episcopal lands …’ This fact, apparent to anyone who glances at the Journal of the House of Commons for 1559, has been ignored by historians who wrote before Pollard and by those who wrote after him. Concerned only with bills dealing with religion, scholars failed to recognize that proposals concerning the distribution of ecclesiastical lands dominated the session. During the two months before Easter private land bills monopolized the Commons' time for three weeks, ruining any timetable the government might have had and helping to persuade, if not forcing, the queen to continue the session after Easter.

Several administrative reforms in the reign of James I are commonly associated with the name of Lionel Cranfield. One such reform is supposed to have occurred in the ordnanceoffice in 1620, though curiously little is known about it. The two principal accounts of the ordnance project are contained in the well-known studies of Cranfield by R. H. Tawney and Menna Prestwich.1 From these two accounts it is possible to glean only a few apparent facts; and these can be stated briefly as follows. The ordnance project is alleged to have been carried out by a special commission appointed in November of 1618 or 1619. Although several officers of the ordnance were included on this commission, they apparently offered no resistance to the reform of their own office. And, finally, the recommendations of the commission are assumed to have been implemented with the result that in 1621 King James was able to report to parliament that ordnance expenditure had been reduced from £34,000 to £14,000 annually.2 The first objective of the present article is to show that all of these assumptions about the ordnance reform of 1620 are mistaken. The second objective is to provide a new account of the ordnance project that is more consistent with the existing evidence. A final objective is to shed new light on the career and impeachment of Lionel Cranfield. Cranfield's career lends itself quite naturally to heroic narrative. His attempt to stave off financial disaster by reforming many departments, including the household, navy, and wardrobe, has the appearance of a Herculean undertaking.

Independent or deferential: the voters of the reign of Queen Anne have been subjected to statistical analysis and their honour has been vindicated. Recent studies of the behaviour of the early-eighteenth-century electorate have declared that these voters were independent. The mid-eighteenth-century electorate, in contrast, was deferential, and the difference between the two electorates has led to speculation about the relation of voter behaviour to social and political structure. Since the politics of Anne' reign was dominated by party, it has been suggested that the existence of party depended, in part, on the presence of an independant electorate. As the structure of mid-century politics can be described without reference to party, it has likewise been postulated that the disappearance of party is a symbol of oligarchic subversion of electoral independence. Yet it may be that the importance of party and other formal political structures as indices of change in the conduct and society of eighteenth-century Englishmen has been overestimated. If the early-eighteenth-century electorate was not as independent as recent interpretations suggest, there is no need to assume a subtle but radical alteration of social structure to explain an alteration in voter behaviour. Change in political structure may not be significantly related to the behaviour and society of England's voters.

In March 1786 a special envoy from Great Britain, William Eden, notified the French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes, of his arrival. Eden's appearance in France represented the culmination of three years of careful diplomacy designed to force the British government into serious commercial negotiations. Ostensibly, the negotiators were to replace the moribund commercial convention of Utrecht (1713) with a new agreement that would extend Anglo-French trade. But for Vergennes, the negotiations involved more than trade: they formed an essential part of his post-war English policy – a policy designed to maintain British isolation and demonstrate the possibilities of Anglo-French co-operation while bringing Great Britain under French influence through penetration of the British economy. Discussions during the next ten months produced a commercial treaty, an additional convention and a draft consular agreement. When the new commercial arrangements were promulgated in May 1787, the French economy was depressed and the French government was in disarray following the death of Vergennes and the dismissal of two other ministers. Hopes for rapprochement vanished when the Dutch crisis ended in a French humiliation at British hands a few months later, but the treaty continued to govern Anglo-French commercial relations until 1793.

A study of the Victorian poacher raises several points of interest for historians of nineteenth-century society. First, he was such an ordinary figure, an accepted and normal part of rural life. In recent works of oral history, old people recall just how important poaching had been for their predecessors, and for the family and village economy. An examination of the statistics of rural crime in the nineteenth century reveals that, together with theft, trespass, vagrancy and Poor Law offences, poaching offences absorbed a major share of the magistrates' time. For example, in 1843, one in four convictions in Suffolk were against the Game Laws, whilst in Norfolk over 2,000 poachers were fined or imprisoned in the years 1863–71. Landowners such as Lord Ashburnham of Battle in Sussex, and Lord Musters and Sutherland in the Midlands, fought a daily, and sometimes losing battle, against these people. In the second quarter of the century poaching was widely regarded as one of the fastest growing crimes in Britain, and, unlike arson, highway robbery, cattle, horse and sheep stealing, it continued to be a prominent and permanent part of the rural scene. Even in the 1880s and 1890s contemporaries were periodically shocked by the bitterness and violence which accompanied this particular criminal activity. A study of poaching, therefore, tells us a good deal about the secret world of the village and the labourer.

Historians have always assumed that what has to be explained about Peel is his flexibility or constant ‘fluctuation of opinion’. Few would accuse him of having practised ‘long meditated deception’ against the party he betrayed in 1829 and 1846; it is a charge which Peel's ghost would complacently deflect by a ritual appeal to ‘conscience’. Hostile commentators have preferred to follow Disraeli in attacking Peel's most sensitive spot – his intellect. Disraeli's analysis is familiar but worth quoting because it established a context for much of the subsequent discussion.

The legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established. Almost every scientist knows – and every viewer of the BBC's recent programme on Darwin was shown – how Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, attempted to pour scorn on Darwin's Origin of species at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and had the tables turned on him by T. H. Huxley. In this memorable encounter Huxley's simple scientific sincerity humbled the prelatical insolence and clerical obscurantism of Soapy Sam; the pretension of the Church to dictate to scientists the conclusions they were allowed to reach were, for good and all, decisively defeated, the autonomy of science was established in Britain and the western world, the claim of plain unvarnished truth on men's allegiance was vindicated, however unwelcome its implications for human vanity might be, and the flood tide of Victorian faith in all its fulsomeness was turned to an ebb, which has continued to our present day and will only end when religion and superstition have been finally eliminated from the minds of all enlightened men. Even churchmen concede that it was a disastrous defeat. Only Owen Chadwick strikes a note of caution, observing that the account given of the incident in Wilberforce's biography seems hardly consistent with an overwhelming defeat, and maintaining that the received account must be a largely legendary creation of a later date.

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:

An issue that has long concerned historians of colonial America is that of the social origins of the English men and women who came to the New World in bondage. It has been estimated that half of all white immigration to the thirteen colonies was made up of indentured servants; therefore no quantitative description of the labour force or the social structure of colonial America is possible without some knowledge of what kinds of people bound themselves to serve in return for passage to the colonies. Historians' assessments of these early immigrants have ranged widely, from Abbot Emerson Smith's judgment that they were ‘the most ignorant and idle’ of English contemporaries to Mildred Campbell's view that ‘most were drawn from the middling classes…the productive groups in England's working population’.

The importance of presbyterianism in London politics during the 1640s has long been recognized, but only recently have its secular aspects received their proper emphasis. The burdens and uncertainties generated by prolonged warfare found expression in a rising tide of moderation and concern for property and social order. ‘City shopkeepers and merchants’ saw in a presbyterian system of church government the means of reimposing discipline upon parochial life through the offices of vestrymen and ruling elder. Of course, London presbyterianism was not merely an expression of economic and social dislocation. Indeed, this study will be very much concerned with the activities of a group of religiously committed presbyterians who were able to secure considerable political influence by exploiting the more amorphous presbyterian sentiment of many of the propertied citizens.

In recent times the historiography of the Wilhelmine Reich has clearly reflected the influence of Eckart Kehr and of later historians who have adopted and developed his work. The Rankean dogma of the Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy) has been replaced by a new slogan, Primat der Innenpolitik (primacy of domestic policy). The resultant interpretive scheme is by now quite familiar. The social structure of the Bismarckean Reich, it is said, was shaken to its foundations by the impact of industrialization. A growing class of industrialists sought to break the power of the feudal agrarian class, and a rapidly developing proletariat threatened to upset the status quo. The internecine struggle between industrialists and agrarians was dangerous for both and for the state, since the final beneficiary might be the proletariat. Consequently agrarians and industrialists closed their ranks against the common social democrat enemy and sought to tame the proletariat, which had grown restive under the impact of the depression, by means of a Weltpolitik which would obviate the effects of the depression, heal the economy, and vindicate the political system responsible for such impressive achievements. Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others call this diversionary strategy against the proletarian threat social imperialism; and this, it is said, is the domestic policy primarily responsible for Wilhelmine imperialism.

Between 1917 and 1919 the United States made its first, spectacular intrusion into European power politics. For President Wilson, entry into the First World War was a chance not only to eliminate an immediate threat to American interests but also to transform international relations. The time had come to weld the industrialized countries into a community of interest, based on a shared loyalty to representative government and the market economy, expressed by membership of a League of Nations, and in which economic and territorial causes of tension would have been removed. But hardly had the German obstacle to this programme been overcome before, at the peace conference of 1919, Wilson ran up against almost equally determined obstruction from his former allies. This article examines one source of that antagonism, in the latent conflict before the armistice between American war aims and those of France. It argues that French policy was moulded by a tension between the Paris leaders' own desires for the settlement with Germany and their need to preserve a system of alliances deemed essential for French security in the future as well as for the war itself. By 1917 French governments were already confronted with dilemmas which were to harass them for the succeeding twenty years.