On 24 April 1547 the forces of the leading protestant princes in Germany were annihilated at Miihlberg by Charles V, and the political wing of protestantism received a blow from which it never entirely recovered. Events during the preceding year had moved with a startling rapidity. Diplomats had widely expected a drawn contest in the summer of 1546, while John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse had sent a series of missions to France and England to request the military aid and intervention which might tip the balance decisively against the emperor. The diplomatic experts of the Schmalkaldic League had expected France to take advantage of the emperor's difficulties in Germany. The outbreak of war there might seem to have brought to fruition decades of French efforts to cripple the emperor by embroiling him with his German subjects, and 1546 certainly saw a culmination of French diplomatic activity across the Rhine. Yet the outcome of the frenetic negotiations which accompanied the war showed, on the part of the French, a lack of decisiveness at this critical time which is not easy to explain. Four years before, a grand anti-Habsburg coalition had been the pivotal point of French foreign policy. Now, in 1546, any chances of such a coalition were frittered away in petty negotiations with the English and a marked lack of faith between the French and the Germans.

While remaining appropriately humble about the crudity of his data and the limitations of his sources, the social historian who is willing to employ numerical methods and statistical procedures can make reasonably confident estimates of the extent of illiteracy in early modern England. A careful examination of the ability of witnesses before the ecclesiastical courts to sign their depositions, of testators to sign their wills, of applicants for marriage licences to sign the allegations and bonds, and of subscribers to protestations and declarations actually to write their names on the document, reveals a pattern of widespread but unevenly distributed illiteracy. The best of these sources provides evidence not only on the social structure of illiteracy, but also on its changing level between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Progress towards the reduction of illiteracy was decidedly erratic.

In 1546 the members of Lincoln's Inn beheld a most peculiar sight in their communal hall. The traditional midsummer light of St John had been replaced with the ridiculous head of a horse. Three young members were charged by the benchers. Two who refused to confess were expelled from the house and imprisoned in the Fleet by the lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and Sir Roger Cholmley, the chief baron of the Exchequer and a former bencher. The other culprit, who confessed and made humble suit to the bench, was merely excluded from commons. After the inevitable petitions, all were forgiven ‘their said lewd and nowghtie mysdemeanours’ and shortly remitted into the house.

English observers in North America before 1640 found much to praise in the character of the Indians. They were a cheerful people, sharing what they possessed with each other, and especially loving as parents. Churlishness was a great crime among them. They were often said to be trustworthy. Above all, they were dignified and courteous; their chief men were grave and wise. In fact, even the most hostile critic allowed the dignity of the Indian. Typical is George Percy in his Discourse of Virginia of 1606, writing of the Werowance of Rapahanna: the Werowance ‘entertained us in so modest a proud fashion as though he had been a Prince of civill government, holding his countenance without laughter or any such ill behaviour’. These words of praise for the Indian were virtually universal, appearing even in the works of men like Ralph Lane, who was fundamentally hostile to them. Moreover, the praise continued from all other colonies after the massacre of 1622 temporarily ended the favourable attitude in Virginia. William Wood, writing in New England in 1634, said that they ‘be wise in their carriage, subtle in their dealings, true in their promise, honest in defraying of their debts…constant in friendship, merrily conceited in discourse, not luxuriously abounding in youth nor dotingly froward in old age…’.

On 3 December 1621 the House of Commons resolved to submit a petition to King James I, asking him for stricter enforcement of the laws against Catholic recusants, asking ‘that your Majesty would propose to yourself to manage this war with the best advantage, by a diversion or otherwise, as in your deep judgement shall be found fittest, and not to rest upon a war in these parts only, which will consume your treasure and discourage your people’, and that ‘our most noble prince may be timely and happily married to one of our own religion’.

The wars in Ireland in 1689–91 have attracted considerable attention from historians, most recently in the fine study by Dr Simms, but what happened in Ireland while James II was still on the English throne has been comparatively neglected. One major reason is that evidence on this period is patchy and often unreliable. Of the state papers, the last letter in the Public Record Office from one of James's chief governors is dated 31 August 1686, although the second earl of Clarendon's own copies of his letters while lord lieutenant continue until his return to England early in 1687. Only a handful of Tyrconnel's letters from this period survive. Copies of Irish letters sent by James and his secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, can be found in the secretaries' letter books, but copies of their more confidential letters were not entered. Sunderland was careful to destroy incriminating material at the Revolution, so much of what survives is routine and innocuous. For the rest, the Ormond papers, a mine of information for half a century of Irish history, peter out after 1686. Thomas Sheridan's ‘Narrative’ is well informed and, I think basically reliable, but its usefulness is reduced by its imprecise chronology. Strict control of the press in 1685–8 ensured that few pamphlets of Irish interest were published, while few of those produced after 1688 have much other than polemic to offer the historian of James's reign.

The Convention Parliament, the revolutionary tribunal of the English Revolution of 1689, prohibited the printing of news of its affairs and barred the public from its debates. Authors, printers and publishers, however, defied these orders and published unlicensed accounts of speeches, votes, committee reports, and the membership of the Convention. Although the laws and administrative procedures which the later Stuarts had used to restrict the press were still in effect, they were not enforced. During the weeks of political crisis, quantities of news-sheets, newspapers and tracts reporting parliamentary news and political opinion appeared. At a time of growing scholarly and popular interest in the Glorious Revolution, it may be useful to examine the relationship between parliament and press. Although studies of the early press and of parliamentary reporting have been made, no detailed examination of these matters during the months of political upheaval in the winter of 1688–9 has been undertaken. Two central questions suggest themselves. How did the politically conscious public learn about what was happening in Westminster where their elected representatives and the peers of the realm were meeting to resolve the crisis facing the nation? What was the attitude of those representatives and peers to having information about their affairs spread beyond their chambers? The answers to such questions may deepen understanding of the Convention and of one aspect of the part played by the press in the Revolution.

In Venice on 5 October 1570:

A man of ordinary height, dressed in the foreign style, with a curved black beard, was escorted into the Holy Office and asked his age.

He answered, ‘Some forty years’.

He was asked his name, his surname, his father, his status, his country and his employment.

He answered, ‘My name is Abraham, called Righetto, my father's Num Rig (a Spaniard of Portugal), my occupation is that of an exchange-broker; I am no Christian but a Jew; and I have been detained in the prisons of the Most Excellent Council of Ten’.

He was asked, ‘For what reason have their Most Excellent Lordships sent you to this Holy Office?’

He answered, ‘I know not, and cannot imagine, for I have never heard of Jews entering this Office’.

He was asked, ‘Do you know what Office it is?’ He answered, ‘This moment I was told it was the Office of the Holy Inquisition’.

He was asked, ‘In the last ten years, where have you lived?’

He answered, ‘Lately I have been in Spain, and was there three years from leaving this place, and I journeyed, too, to France; and seven months have passed since my return to Venice’.

On returning to England in 1900 after an absence of some thirty-two years, James Ford Rhodes was much surprised by a number of changes he observed, and more particularly by the novel attitude of a number of newspapers and journals which had previously reflected more traditional assumptions and beliefs. Radicals, from Paine and Cobbett, Bentham and the Mills to Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School had traditionally identified America as the precursor of the new millennium. In contrast to this radical tradition was a conservative counter-theme that insisted that within its revolutionary and republican origins lay the seeds of American self-destruction. All such convictions seemed confirmed by the civil war, and The Times under Delane – the apogee of this conservative tradition – continued to prophesy the imminent collapse of the Union throughout most of the war. Yet in 1901 Rhodes noticed a far more sympathetic approach to American matters by the conservative Times and Spectator, and their formerly denigrating tone now echoed ironically in the pages of the radical Speaker. The purpose of this article is to try to explain some of the intellectual origins of this fundamental realignment, with reference to changing English interpretations of the American race, of the American revolution and of the American constitution, particularly as reflected in James Bryce's American Commonwealth, the classic exposition of this reinterpretation. This realignment was effected by a small body of academics, jurists and intellectuals whose writings in learned journals, legal textbooks and works of comparative politics lacked extensive appeal.

The events of the Revolution of 1688 were the subject of an explosive pamphlet debate in which conservatives and radicals sought to capture the ideological initiative by imposing their rival interpretations upon events. The tories, who in large part brought about the Revolution, attempted to account for the nation's acceptance of the setdement in terms which could be accommodated within the traditional tory principles of non-resistance, hereditary right and monarchical prerogative. Recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which the settlement was a compromise between conflicting whig and tory attitudes to monarchy, and within die context of this revision of the ‘whig’ interpretation a number of the arguments deployed by tories in 1689 and in subsequent years have now been elucidated.

Historians have displayed a curious ambivalence towards the English Revolution of 1688. On the one hand, they have argued that it preserved the monarchy; on the other, that it altered it. Edmund Burke was one of the earliest to voice this ambivalence. ‘The Revolution was made', he wrote in 1790, ‘to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.’ But then he added,’ They [who led at the Revolution] secured soon after the frequent meeting of parliament, by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom.’ Macaulay expressed the same uncertainty in a single sentence: ‘But, though a new constitution was not needed, it was plain that changes were required.’

The League of Princes (Fürstenbund) was founded on 23 July 1785, when the representatives of Prussia, Hanover and Saxony signed at Berlin a main treaty and several secret articles relating to the domestic affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. During the following months a number of other German princes joined the League, notably the elector of Mainz, the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, the margrave of Baden and the dukes of Brunswick, Saxony-Gotha and Saxony-Weimar.s Its general objective was the preservation of the imperial status quo. More specifically, it was aimed at the Emperor Joseph II and the innumerable schemes of expansion popularly attributed to him, not always without justification. More specifically still, the League was designed to prevent any renewal of Joseph's most cherished ambition - the exchange of the Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands (which embraced the larger part of present-day Belgium) for the Electorate of Bavaria. From the European perspective, the League was soon overshadowed by the reopening of the Eastern Question in 1787, eclipsed by the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1788 and finally extinguished by the Austro-Prussian rapprochement in 1792, but during 1785–6 it assumed great importance. Not the least affected was Great Britain, whose king - albeit in his capacity as elector of Hanover - was a founder-member of the League and one of its most enthusiastic protagonists. Despite the official British view - repeated ad nauseam to sceptical foreign diplomats - that Georg Kurfürst von Hannover and George III King of England were two entirely separate beings and that consequently the actions of the former could have not the least effect on the latter's domains, British policy could not help but be influenced.

On 17 February 1827 Lord Liverpool suffered a paralytic stroke. His physical disintegration was followed by the break-up of the alliance which he had built and presided over for fifteen years. He had been a living guarantee that catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform could not be passed, which secured the support of the king and the country gentlemen. At the same time, he had guarded the backs of his liberal foreign and finance ministers against the threat of conservative attack, and thus enabled the government to adapt its policies in those departments to the pressures of the post-war world.

In the light of previous historiography any reference to tory organization in the mid-eighteenth century is likely to seem a contradiction in terms. In the Enid Muir Lecture of 1954, Sir Lewis Namier argued that by the 1750s ‘tory’ had become effectively redundant as a party name: that the term could no longer be used to describe a particular set of political beliefs, nor applied to any recognized group within parliament; that those few individual M.P.'s who still called themselves tories should more properly be regarded as independent country gentlemen: ‘a nationwide group without a leader or programme or deeper coherence’. As Namier went on to remark, hardly any political correspondence between leading tories has survived for the period after 1715. The consequent temptation for historians to rely either on the ill-informed and frequently contemptuous assessments of the tory party supplied by whig observers, or to assume that the lack of any easily available evidence presupposes a concomitant paucity of tory organization, has usually proved irresistible.

Recent writers have pointed out that the 1834 act often made little immediate difference to the practice of local poor-law authorities. The poor-law commissioners lacked the means or the will to enforce their programme. Poor law unions did not replace the township as the effective unit of administration. The same men (albeit with different titles) remained in control. Authorities continued to vary greatly in efficiency and generosity, strong determinants of leniency or harshness being the fortunes of the local economy and the strength of local impulses towards paternalism or frugality. In Nottinghamshire, for example, relief policy became steadily more stringent from the 1820s onwards, largely owing to the work of cost-conscious magistrates; 1834 speeded the current, rather than changed its course. On the other hand, in the Durham unions surveyed by Peter Dunkley, relief was generous throughout the 1830s, but stingy when the local economy was hit by slump after 1840; in the Hungry Forties, the Durham unions were as ruthless as the poor law commission in their attitude towards the poor – and sometimes, indeed, were more so, the commission protesting vainly against the overcrowding of workhouses. Even local authorities' generous phases reflected a shrewd assessment of the ratepayers' best interests: Rhodes Boyson has shown how the north-east Lancashire unions' insistence on continuing outdoor relief was due in part to a realisation that to enforce indoor relief in all cases would be much more costly.

This is a study of a colonial situation in its making, at ground level. It offers an analysis of a forcible process of political accumulation, the means whereby their British conquerors came to terms with the peoples of western Kenya, and a prerequisite for the pursuit of capital accumulation, the appropriation of economic resources from the native peoples of Kenya to the benefit of its British colonists. The case of western Kenya offers no paradigm for the European occupation of the rest of the African continent. Nor can any other case. The relative weights of subjugation and accommodation, of rupture and continuity within conquest – of such great influence on the structure and texture of the colonial era which followed – were governed by too many variables. Brief mention of only four of them will be enough to indicate some of the pitfalls of generalization, even generalization about difference.

One of the perquisites of having been a high ranking Conservative politician is the near-certain admiration of future biographers, even when, as in the case of Sire James Graham, the biographers have no political axe to grind and do not rise to hero worship. Professor Erickson and Professor Ward, Graham's most recent biographers, do not ignore the fierce contemporary condemnation that Graham evoked: Ward, indeed, takes Graham's unpopularity as the starting point for a re-evalution of his career. But both have distinguished between his skills in political management, his political acumen and personality, on the one hand, and his vision, ability, enterprise and industry on the other, and by concentrating on the latter have produced a picture of which Graham would have approved. What results is, in many respects, a typical Peelite self-portrait – of a bold, resourceful, tireless and courageous reformer, valiantly struggling against vested interest, ignorance and apathy, saddened but not surprised by the hostility which he experienced.

French foreign policy during the Orleans Monarchy was dominated by the search for an agreement with another power. In the first two years of the new monarchy's existence the fear of isolation exercised a profound influence over the conduct of French diplomacy and almost every French politician and diplomat regarded an entente with another great power as the only remedy. Thus the immediate aim of foreign policy was to divide the enemies of France. Throughout the negotiations in London in 1831 and 1832 on the Belgian question, Talleyrand, the French ambassador in London, regarded the prevention of an anti-French coalition as his major objective. The pursuit of French interests in the Low Countries, however important, had to be subordinated to this overriding aim. It was to England that Talleyrand looked for support; he rightly believed that the Whigs were ideologically opposed to a conservative coalition against France and that it was the English government which had the most to gain from co-operation with France on the Belgian question. Once it became clear - as it certainly had by mid-1832 - that there was little likelihood of the emergence of an anti-French coalition, the search for an agreement with another power could be associated with the pursuit of more positive ends.

Historians have generally accepted the verdict that the 1902 Education Act was ‘among the two or three greatest constructive measures of the twentieth century’. Most have accepted likewise the interpretation laid down by the biographer of the Act's alleged author, Sir Robert Morant, that an educational crisis forced the Unionist government to begin thinking seriously about education. Their ineptitude, shown in attempts at legislation in 1900 and 1901, forced them to turn to the one man who could help, namely Morant, secretary to the vice president of the Board of Education, Sir John Gorst, and then to the president, the duke of Devonshire. Thus ‘Balfour, Hicks-Beach and Chamberlain had all to bow the knee to his [Morant's] ruthless tenacity in argument’, whilst Morant ‘had to show Balfour and the Cabinet how the policies of their party and their own inarticulate major premises inevitably led them to the 1902 Bill – as Morant was writing it’.

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.