The states of sixteenth-century Europe fell into two financial groups. France and Spain, in a class of their own, enjoyed an apparently total freedom for much of the time from the normal constraints, and this in spite of their rapidly escalating debts. The other European states which made up the second category were compelled to observe far more stringent controls. The distinction between the two groups was further underlined by the question of credit. Although the Habsburg and Valois monarchs spent in a way that was both financially reckless and socially unpitying, the moneyed classes were only too eager to advance additional funds. Repeated, and sometimes spectacular, failures seemed rarely to have damped their enthusiasm. The smaller states seldom found such ease of access to credit. For most of the time they were obliged to maintain a semblance of order by sustained and sordid frugality - the bilking of minor creditors, the levying of dubious ‘loans’, or the dissipation of capital. While no strangers to these devices, France and Spain were able to operate for prolonged periods free from ordinary limitations. But even for these privileged beings the moment of truth eventually arrived. Resources were finite; and even an imperial state could exhaust the credit, if not the credulity, of its principal bankers. Such an intrusion of reality took the form of a public bankruptcy.

English political thought in the early seventeenth century is often regarded in terms of the disagreements between the king and his parliaments, and of debates amongst lawyers on the nature and contents of the ancient constitution. But a large proportion of the political writings of early seventeenth-century English theorists was directed against the views of Catholic authors. Sir Robert Filmer devoted much of his Patriarcha to refuting the theories of those two great pillars of counter-reformation Catholicism, Bellarmine and Suarez. Suarez's Defensio fidei was burned at Paul's Cross on 21 November 1613. James I believed that by ‘setting up the People above their naturall King’ the political thinking of the Jesuits laid ‘ an excellent ground in Divinitie for all rebels and rebellious people’. One aim of this paper is to suggest that many of the most characteristic ideas on politics of English writers in the early seventeenth century can best be understood in the context of their polemical aim: the refutation of the seditious doctrines of the Papists. This is particularly true of patriarchalism, a subject on which Filmer was no innovator.

In the eighteenth century Louis XV's minister, Cardinal Dubois, defended himself against papal criticism of his appetite for church benefices by ordering that a list of benefices held by his seventeenth-century counterparts be prepared and sent to Rome. It was his way of proving that he was much less voracious than they had been.His defence serves to remind the historian of the extent to which the ancien régime church was dominated by powerful families and ministers, who enriched themselves considerably by amassing wealthy benefices. However, none of these cardinal-ministers, from Richelieu to Dubois, succeeded in founding ecclesiastical dynasties capable of preserving intact after their death the ecclesiastical possessions they had acquired; dynasties of this type had practically vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, having fallen foul of both the crown and of church reformers. While drawing enormous incomes from their benefices, Richelieu, Mazarin and Dubois accepted that their benefices, like their other offices, should be at the king's disposal after their death. This had not always been the case. Had Dubois’ historical curiosity been more disinterested, he would have discovered that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ecclesiastical dynasties of varying importance and staying-power had flourished within the French church, characterized by their ability to acquire and transmit large numbers of wealthy and prestigious benefices to family members over several generations. The minimum require ment for success was the breeding of younger sons and daughters prepared to ‘enter the church’ in order to perpetuate dynastic control of benefices.

Factionalism among the nobility and gentry was a common although by no means universal phenomenon of local politics in Tudor England. During the 1560s it was the foremost fact in the political life of Hampshire. Co-operation among the gentry is at least as significant a phenomenon for the historian as conflict. At the same time conflict is much more likely to have left documen tation. The amiable resolution of local issues would usually be celebrated by silence while a dispute was likely to culminate in a lawsuit. For Hampshire in the 1560s the survival of one of the earliest and most fully preserved disputed election cases in Star Chamber from the reign of Elizabeth provides crucial evidence of the occurrence of conflict and the motivations of the participants. Thanks to the existence of this material, which includes lists of voters for both sides, the members of both factions are clearly identified. In addition the local issues at stake are further clarified. As a result all of the evidence surviving for the entire decade can be tied together to produce a comprehensive picture of the local political situation in Hampshire.

For the last two centuries Edward Gibbon has been regarded—either favourably or disparagingly - as the Enlightenment's greatest celebrant of the ‘triumph of human reason’. He has been almost invariably portrayed as an essentially optimistic believer in rational man's potential for social progress and moral advancement. Much of Gibbon's modern reputation as the Enlightenment's historian par excellence is due to early and widespread acceptance of certain assumptions about his religious sentiments. There has been a strong tendency to assume that Gibbon stood in the vanguard of what Peter Gay has called ‘modern paganism’: ‘The French philosophes and British infidels like Hume or Gibbon rejected revealed religion so vehemently and so completely that the Christian contribution to their ideas was modest and subterranean; they were usually unaware of it’. Gibbon has been traditionally seen as a vocal deist, while the account of the rise and consolidation of the Christian church contained within The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (1776–88) has often been thought intrinsically anti-christian.

In 1620 Thomas Scott published a notorious pamphlet entitled Vox Populi. This purported to recount the proceedings of the Spanish council of state and denounced the devious machinations of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, and by implication the pro-Spanish policy of King James. Once Scott's authorship became known he took the traditional way out and fled to the Low Countries. There he served as a preacher with the English regiments and as a minister at Utrecht. He also continued his pamphlet commentary on events in England. Scott, then, was that well-known figure, the radical puritan opponent of the Jacobean regime. He has certainly been cast in that role and until recently such a view of his career would have seemed unexceptionable enough. However, of late there has emerged a corpus of work which might be thought to render any such view of Scott untenable. On the one hand, the existence within the mainstream of English protestantism of anything approaching a coherent body of puritan attitudes has been challenged, at least until the emergence of Arminianism polarized religious opinion and almost created a self-conscious and aggressive puritanism where there had been none before. In the political sphere it has been claimed that within the predominant view of constitutional and political propriety any attempt at concerted opposition to royal policy was both conceptually and practically impossible.

Whatever their differing interpretations of the prehistory of the Civil War, historians of early Stuart England have long recognized the unsolved problems raised by the parliament of 1628. Did Charles I abuse the legal procedures of King's Bench in the five knights’ case in order to defy the spirit of English ‘due process’ legislation? In starting the chain of events which led to the petition, who were the innovators? Why did the house of commons pass resolutions which were an absolute denial of Charles I's right of discretionary imprisonment in any circumstances? And why did M.P.s endure the ugliest parliamentary scenes before 1640 in their desire to secure an explanatory document in the spirit of their resolutions? In view of the wealth of literature on the petition, it is perhaps surprising that these issues have never been satisfactorily addressed.

On 28 January 1689 the house of commons of the newly assembled Convention resolved that King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the constitution of this kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and people, and by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, has abdicated the government and that the throne is thereby vacant.

Were the knowledge of the ablest farmers in the best-cultivated parts of the island collected, - English Agriculture would be found, at this day, to be far advanced towards perfection… In short, the art of agriculture must ever remain imperfect while it is suffered to languish in the memory, and die with the practitioner: RECORD, only, can perpetuate the art; and SYSTEM, alone, render the science comprehensive. William Marshall, The rural economy of Norfolk, 1 (London, 1787), vi–vii.

It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India, which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of men's life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.

In December 1721 the Irish parliament threw out the heads of a bill to establish a national bank in Ireland, and both houses passed resolutions which leave no doubt that the bank was perceived as a major constitutional threat. It has been clear to all historians that opposition to the bank was not based on a simple assessment of its economic viability, but it is much less clear that the political considerations that were involved have been as fully appreciated. L. M. Cullen has drawn attention to the extent to which eighteenth-century accounts of the Irish economy are coloured by non-economic criteria, and in particular ‘by a nascent constitutional agitation and economic nationalism’ in the 1720s. ‘An economic mythology established itself very quickly with the writings of the 1720s and the political concerns which manifested themselves in that decade providing the base of arguments which were repeated in subsequent writing.’ If this is true, then it is no less necessary to have a clear account of those political concerns than to have an economic history that is free of them.

Agricultural distress following the Napoleonic wars evoked various responses from those classes whose interests were most immediately bound up with the land. Such factors as decreasing market prices and hence wages, a falling standard of living, and rising indebtedness incited, on the one hand, the disciples of Captain Swing to attempt to restore to the agricutural labourer his dispossessed inheritance, or at least to register protest at its loss. For the landowners and farmers, on the other hand, constitutional means of redress were clearly more acceptable, and between 1815 and 1845 there were several attempts to develop a protectionist organization of farmers’ associations, led, particularly in the early years, by George Webb Hall, and in the latter often associated with Lord Chandos.

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.

Like many of his contemporaries, John Locke was concerned with the problems inherent in both the communication and the recovery of an author's meaning. Language and its proper use was of the utmost significance for him. He was in no doubt that God had granted language to man to act as ‘the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society’, but though God-given, language as man had used it had not proved an unmitigated blessing:

he that shall well consider the Errors and Obscurity, the Mistakes and Confusion, that is spread in the World by an ill use of Words, will find some reason to doubt, whether Language, as it has been employ'd, has contributed more to the improvement or hindrance of Knowledge amongst Mankind.

Gladstone has not been well served by the historiographical tradition dominant for much of this century. It has disseminated an image of him that emphasizes little more than an undefined ‘reformism’ and a moralizing populism; this is as unhelpful and distorted as is the interpretation, emanating from the same source, of much of the rest of nineteenth-century politics. It is no longer enough to judge public figures of this period by the degree of their commitment to nebulous platitudes like ‘social reform’ or ‘progress’: historians have recently exposed the flimsy foundations that sustain the reputations of even those most frequently celebrated in these spheres. It is misleading to concentrate attention on the development of institutional reform, centralized government, trade union legislation, or welfare statutes for the poor; franchise extension apart, advances here were often provoked solely by bureaucratic agency or by the concern of philanthropic backbenchers, and contributed only occasionally to the major disputes of Victorian political society. If we are to shed light on the domestic issues of vital importance to contemporary politicians, we need a far more coherent account than is now available of financial, taxation and land policy on the one hand, and, on the other, of the main subject of this article, the role of religion in politics.

Many historians now recognize that the establishment of central government inspection was of great importance in advancing mid-nineteenth-century social and administrative reform. MacDonagh, for example, calls the appointment of inspectors ‘a step of immense, if unforeseen, consequences’. Parris, in many respects MacDonagh’s critic, acknowledges that inspectors ‘played a leading role in legislation, including the development of their own powers’. Other authorities have taken a similar line; indeed, Burn maintains that the period could be characterized ‘the age of the inspector’, so pervasive was his influence.

During the period from the Reform Act of 1832 to the early 1880s, when a change set in, the house of lords was perceptibly weaker than the house of commons. The prevailing view of its position, accepted for the most part even by the peers themselves, was expressed in Walter Bagehot's highly influential English constitution (1867, rev. 1872), where the house of lords is described as safe from rough destruction but not from inner decay, the danger coming not so much from assassination as atrophy, not from abolition but decline. This description drew on Bagehot's distinction between the dignified and efficient parts of the constitution. The house of lords belonged to the first category: that house in its dignified capacity inspired a reverence in the people that attached them to the government. Yet, paradoxically, in view of the great respect for the aristocracy, the house of lords had been subordinate as a legislative chamber to the house of commons even before the Reform Act of 1832; and since then this subordination had grown ever more pronounced.

In 1830 the French Bourbon monarchy fell in the midst of a.political crisis that had developed rapidly between 1827 and 1830 after the Restoration settlement had operated, apparently harmoniously, for fifteen years. The two general elections of 1827 and 1830 resulted in the very swift growth of a liberal majority in parliament, and Charles X, unwilling to defer entirely to the majority in the choice of his ministers and unable, because of custom established since 1814, to defy that majority, attempted to alter the constitution by decree in 1830. The ‘three glorious revolutionary days’ led to the replacement of Charles by his cousin Louis-Philippe. In the last election of Louis XVIII's reign in 1824 only 40 liberals were elected in the whole of France. In 1827 about 180 were successful, making their representation roughly equal to that of the supporters of the Villèle government, with between 60 and 80 ultra-royalists to their right. In by-elections in 1828 and 1829 the liberals won 50 of the 75 seats fought. The election of 1830 confirmed the growth of support for the liberals with 202 of the 221 who voted the motion of no-confidence in the government being re-elected, and a total of 270 opponents, whereas the Polignac government had a mere 145 adherents. This dramatic swing in the elections of Charles X's reign was national in scale but was most complete in northern and eastern France. In 1829 four of the five most liberal departments in terms of parliamentary representation were in the east.

The purpose of the article is to examine the official response to the widespread series of disorders occurring in France following poor harvests in the 1840s and 1850s. A large number of studies of popular protest have been written in recent years. Most have failed to consider the forms of repression employed, and yet this is an essential means of understanding both the scale and the characteristics of protest. Our essential concern is thus with the techniques of repression employed in this period prior to the development of modern police and bureaucratic systems.