It is well known that the Tudor monarchs exerted highly effective control over the financial resources of the English Church, particularly in the years after the Henrician Reformation. So marked a feature of the sixteenth century were the demands which the Crown, followed by the rest of the leading laity, made upon the Church in order to gain easy profit, that the period has on occasions been characterized as the ‘ age of plunder ’ The dissolution of the monasteries, and its economic and social consequences, have long been the subject of scholarly attention and debate. The fortunes of the secular church, in contrast, have roused relatively little interest, except as a background to the Laudian revival. This is, of course, in part because the crisis which the parochial clergy, cathedral chapters and bishops, experienced, was less dramatic than that of the monks and chantry priests, and, perhaps partly because demands upon the secular church were often for taxation rather than for outright gifts of lands. None of the Tudors showed the slightest inclination to disturb the fundamental tithe relationship within the parishes, and there were very few, even among the most ardent advocates of reform, who spoke openly for the old Lollard concept of making tithe dependent upon the quality of the incumbent.

For a half-century, historians, accepting an interpretation put forward by Francis Relf in the introduction to the Camden Society's publication of several of the scribbled books of Henry Elsing, clerk of the parliament in the 1620s, have viewed the revival of judicature in parliament in 1621 from the distorted framework of the struggle for supremacy between the two great systems of law in England. An explanation more consistent with all of the evidence surrounding this event - which brought with it the most significant constitutional develop ment in the house of lords since the middle ages - lies in the connection between slow process and due process in English justice. Professor William Jones singled out slow justice in the courts as the central judicial problem of the age and observed that it defeated both the great equity jurist, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and his equally famous counterpart, Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, since ‘neither man could think of a remedy which would restrain litigants and yet leave their legally justified rights untarnished’. The revival of judicature in the house of lords in 1621, most especially in its appellate civil aspects, was part of the most ambitious attempt to solve this dilemma in the early seventeenth century. While it failed in its immediate goal and slow justice remained the nemesis of due process in the English legal system, the experiment begun in 1621 permanently altered the constitutional framework of England by establishing the house of lords once again as the high court of parliament.

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 argument presented here rests on three assumptions. The first is that, at least in commercial terms, a capitalist system was in operation in Europe by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its features included a well-developed structure of international exchange, complex trade patterns, sophisticated methods of organization and finance, a realization of the importance of ‘putting money out to work’, and a versatility of mercantile activity that was a product of the most spectacular boom, expansion of trade, and growth of the merchant community that Europe had ever seen.

The ordinary revenue of the kings of Scotland in the early seventeenth century was drawn from a wide variety of sources. The comptroller received the revenues known as ‘property’ - fixed revenues and rents from Crown lands, payments from royal burghs, customs duties and the impost of wines. Out of these he met the"expenses of the royal household. The treasurer was responsible .for meeting nearly all other official and royal expenses out of the ‘casualty’, which included feudal casualties (irregular payments such as wards and reliefs), escheats, compositions and other profits of justice. The collector general and the treasurer of the new augmentations received various revenues from former church property. Administration of these revenues was simplified in 1610 when the earl of Dunbar, already treasurer, was appointed in addition comptroller, collector general and treasurer of the new augmentations, thus bringing responsibility for all branches of the ordinary revenue into the hands of one man, though he continued usually to be referred to simply as the treasurer. This amalgamation of offices became permanent, though the four offices all continued to exist in name until 1707, and separate accounting for the different branches of revenue continued until 1636.

Although ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are among the most historic words in the language of English politics, their origins have never been subjected to modern scholarly study. Modern historians of the Exclusion Crisis are attracted by other aspects of the period; we find in the words little of die immediate relevance or historical continuity which Macaulay saw when he wrote glowingly of ‘two nicknames which, diough originally given in insult, were soon assumed with pride, which are still in daily use, which have spread as widely as the English race, and which will last as long as the English literature’.

Although it is not free from errors in detail, one of the considerable merits of Macaulay's History of England is the attention it gives to the newspaper Press and to the effects of the Licensing Act and of its expiry in 1695. More recently Dr de Beer has provided an admirable but brief account of the period from 1695 to 1702, but these explorations have served to open up rather than to exhaust the subject. In the present article also some interesting and important topics will have to be neglected, such as the advertisements in newspapers, the publication of literary and trade journals, and the politics behind die discontinuance of the Licensing Act in 1695.

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.

After a period of comparative neglect, historians are re-examining the English Revolution of 1688 with revived interest and revised interpretation. In the past few decades numerous works have carefully re-investigated and often reinterpreted the roles played by such disparate groups as the Whigs, die nobility, the common people, and die urban mob, as well as by such leading individuals as die Earl of Sunderland, James II, and William of Orange. They have broadened our perspective of the Revolution by placing it in die wider context of European affairs and have persuasively demonstrated that die replacement of James II by William and Mary was justified most frequently and effectively not by John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, which was indeed composed prior to 1688, but by mat old relic from James I's reign, divine right of kings.

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

In the years following the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1763, George Grenville possessed a reputation for his consistent demands that Britain's war-proven naval superiority should be used to strengthen British diplomacy and prevent the Family Compact reacquiring die means of endangering Britain. In a typical statement to the Commons in 1768, referring to the Grafton Government's mishandling of the Corsican crisis, he said: ‘for fear of going to war, you will make war unavoidable’. It is interesting, therefore, to examine how and for what reasons the Grenville Government used its naval resources in conjunction with diplomacy to defend British interests when they were threatened consecutively in Honduras, Turks Island, and the Gambia in 1764–5.

‘Cambridge idealism’ – the phrase sounds like a mischievous verbal paradox. Idealism, as Richter has accustomed us to suppose, set the tone of late nineteenth-century Oxford; while contemporary Cambridge, Lord Annan teaches, preserved a tradition of empirical rationalism. At Balliol Green and Toynbee evolved a ‘secular religion’ from the metaphysics of Hegel and Kant; at Cambridge Sidgwick and Marshall embarked upon a rationalist revision of utilitarianism, developing (for the most part) suggestions incompletely worked out by Mill. Green and Toynbee were idealists; Sidgwick and Marshall were rationalists: the differences between the philosophic systems thery constructed seem crystal clear. Yet the contrast can be exaggerated. Whether their fundamental premiss was the principle of utility or the conviction that ‘the Universe is a single, eternal activity or energy, of which it is the essence to be self-conscious, that is, to be itself and not-itself,’ Oxford idealists and Cambridge rationalists were both preoccupied by contemporary social problems, both formulated essentially social philosophies concerned with the right conduct of individuals in their relations with others, and both arrived at comparable policy prescriptions at almost exactly the same time.

Two major themes have been orchestrated in the course of recent research into the period 1688 to 1714. In the sphere of politics, die extent and intensity of party conflict, especially in Anne's reign, has been laid bare in the work of G. Holmes and W. A. Speck, among others; whilst J. H. Plumb, in The Growth of Political Stability has sketched the motive forces behind the spreading and then the quieting, of that conflict.1 In the second recently developed area, that of public financ , P. G. M. Dickson's The Financial Revolution in Englandhas provided us with the insights and precision necessary to qualify and confirm previous assertions about the substantial contribution made by the developing ‘funding system’ to the success of England, under William and then Marlborough, in holding off Louis XIV, and, consequently, in establishing the Hanoverian dynasty on the throne.2

The triumph of Pitt's ministry in 1784 over the Fox-North Coalition is a familiar event in British political history. But the consolidation of the ministry after 1784 has yet to be analyzed in detail. Though the general election of 1784, accompanied by spectacular demonstrations of public opinion in support of the government, clinched Pitt's victory, there was no immediate return to tranquillity. Within two years, Pitt was defeated on four major issues: the Westminster scrutiny, the Irish Resolutions, parliamentary reform, and the duke of Richmond's scheme for the fortification of the dockyards.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent and character of the early legitimist opposition to the Orleanist regime. It seeks to demonstrate the secondary importance of their political loyalties for most of those with a significant material stake and status in the existing society. The basic theme is thus one of the effective formation of a conservative alliance pursuing the politics of selfinterest and prepared to sacrifice its ideals to do so. The cause of the legitimate monarch after 1830 could only have succeeded, and only came close to succeeding, if and when it promised to serve as the most efficient guarantor of social order. It failed because it appeared too concerned with ideology and ideals and not sufficiently with compromise, conservative unity and material progress. Its weakness was evident in 1830 in the manner in which its potential supporters reacted to the change of government.

The existence of royal ‘influence’ was central to the political system of eighteenth-century England. However, the influence of the Crown occupies a curiously tangential place in the political thought of the period. Always difficult to ignore, influence gained recognition chiefly from those groups intent on destroying it – the Old-Whig enemies of corruption, the Country opposition to Walpole and the radical reformers late in the century. But the constant ambiguity as to the exact nature of the balance of the constitution may be explained primarily by the presence of opposed views about influence. While the numerous enemies of influence seem to have had their way in the law-books and other standard accounts of die constitution, an interpretation of British government, leaning more to realism than to legalism, sometimes surfaced in those ministerialists who defended places for M.P.s as the essential lubricant to die machinery. A realistic assessment of influence not only departed from die model of three equal and independent estates, it was also to provide a basis for understanding political parties within the framework of the balanced constitution.

For the first two years of the war the French government drew up no programme of its war aims. When the cabinet began to consider its aims in Europe during the summer of 1916, it still avoided serious discussion of war aims overseas. Faced with the overwhelming preoccupations of the Western Front, the government paid little heed to the future of the Empire. Such war aims as France possessed outside Europe by the time of the armistice were arrived at in two ways: first, by ad hoc agreenebts with her allies in the Middle East and in West Africa, agreements forced on the government by the course of the war; secondly, by a commission d'étude established in 1918 to prepare for the peace conference, a commission from which ministers were excluded. The colonial war aims that emerged in these two separate ways were the product not of the French cabinet but of the parti colonial and its sympathizers within the foreign and colonial ministries.

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.