Few politicians can have been as maligned, insulted and manhandled as John Stuart, third earl of Bute. Before 1760, cosseted within the confines of the Prince of Wales's court at Leicester House, this former Scottish representative peer was of little public note although he had acted as the lifeline between Pitt and the reversionary interest between 1755 and 1758. In London society he was known for his intellectual pretensions (he was a very competent botanist), his haughty airs, and a shapely figure which was displayed to such good effect in the theatrical productions held under the auspices of the Princess Dowager. It was only after 1760, when it became abundantly clear that the youthful George — if not his mother - was infatuated with Bute, that the royal favourite was exposed to the bleak winds of political hostility,. Admittedly there were rumours before George's accession about the subsequently notorious liaison between Bute and the Princess Dowager, rumours that Sir John Pringle told Boswell emanated from the intrigues of Bute's rivals at Leicester House. But these were a mere foretaste of what was to come: after 1760, whether Bute was serving the king (1761–3) or out of office, he was attacked by the mob, threatened with assassination, vilified in pamphlets, prints, newspapers, songs, plays, and handbills, and effectively rejected as a potential ally by all the leading politicians of the day except for the none too politically respectable Henry Fox. The bulk of this criticism was levelled in the 1760s, but even after 1770 the so-called ‘Northern Machiavel’ was under withering if increasingly sporadic fire, and as late as the 1780s vestigial elements of the old hostility remained.

Two of the most basic functions of any government are the maintenance of order and defence against rebellion or invasion. In the England of Charles II these functions, one police, the other military, were performed by the small standing army and the militia. James II enlarged the army and so was able to use it to maintain order to a greater extent than Charles had done. At the same time he deliberately neglected the militia (except in London) and made sweeping and highly unpopular changes among the lords lieutenant and deputy lieutenants who commanded it. As a result, when William of Orange invaded late in 1688 and James tried to raise the militia, he found it both disorganized and disaffected. Many lieutenancies failed to perform the auxiliary military functions which James expected, and some sections of the militia joined, or were raised by, insurgents against the king. However, the police function of the militia, unlike the military function, did not fail; both properly-appointed lieutenants and insurgents used the forces at their disposal to maintain order, having no desire to encourage or condone violence and looting.

In 1964, Mr Peter Laslett drew attention to a discovery of some importance to Harrington scholars. Professor Gilbert Gilchrist, according to Laslett's report, had found ‘a manuscript version of an early part of Oceana… which may have been written well before the book appeared in 1656; indeed before the Commonwealth began’. The manuscript lay in the British Museum. Since Gilchrist's original discovery – really rediscovery, for the staff of the museum had indexed the manuscript under ‘Harrington’ – two more manuscript versions of Oceana have been unearthed, one of them in the British Museum, the other in the Bodleian. All three manuscripts are very much the same, and all seem candidates for Laslett's description as manuscript versions of Oceana written well before the publication of Harrington's printed book in 1656. Unfortunately Mr Laslett's understandable optimism is almost certainly misplaced, for the manuscripts seem much more likely to have been subsequent extracts from Oceana, taken probably in the 1690s. So much for our hopes of observing Harrington's mind working at early drafts of Oceana. But something, too, is gained. The striking differences which gave Laslett his grounds for thinking Gilchrist's manuscript to be an early version of Oceana turn out, in fact, to represent a fascinating exercise in late seventeenth-century domestication of Harrington by his interpreters. The manuscripts show how Harrington, a supporter of revolution, was made a conservative.

One of the most fruitful developments in the recent historiography of the English Civil War has been the growing interest in its local dimension. Historians are no longer content to study the constitutional and religious struggles as though they occurred in a vacuum at Westminster, but have examined the diverse reactions to those conflicts within the patchwork of local communities, and the machinery through which central orders were executed – Or circumvented – at the grass-roots level.

During the generation before the French Revolution, die Atlantic colonial powers - Britain, France, Spain - endeavoured in various ways to assert metropolitan control of trade and expansion in the colonies. The revolt of Britain's American colonies was the most spectacular failure of such policies, but it did not deter eidier London or Versailles after the peace of 1783 from continuing to seek a more active supervision of their colonial outposts. Among symptoms of this activity were the energetic policies of die French ministry of marine under Castries, and the creation of the Board of Control for India and the renovated Board of Trade under Pitt

The peace treaties concluded at Utrecht in March 1713, and the subsequent related treaties, were made memorable by the controversy which surrounded the British Ministry's part in forcing them through in defiance of the wishes of the Allies. Britain obtained considerable territorial and commercial concessions from France and Spain, together with general recognition of the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover. The Allies had less cause for satisfaction. The House of Habsburg, whose claim to the whole Spanish empire had been recognized by Britain since 1703, had to be content with the Southern Netherlands and a part of the former Spanish possessions in Italy. The United Provinces received a less favourable military barrier against France in the Nedierlands than they had been led to expect. From the point of view of the predominantly Tory Ministry, however, the most dangerous critic of the peace was the eleotor of Hanover, the future George I, who allied himself closely with the Whigs in their efforts to continue the War of the Spanish Succession until the throne of Spain was obtained for the Imperial House. The insistence of the Whigs that the Bourbon incumbent should give up the Spanish throne, compelled if necessary by Louis XIV, had caused the breakdown of negotiations in 1709–10, and, together with their injudicious impeachment of Henry Sacheverell, hastened their own dismissal by Queen Anne in June-September 1710 to make way for the more pacific Tories. The continued alliance of the House of Hanover with the Whigs after Anne's death in 1714 was to prolong the controversy concerning the peace; for one of the first actions of George I's Ministry, after their consolidation in parliament in the general election of 1715, was to impeach Oxford, Bolingbroke and others responsible for the Peace of Utrecht.

Francois de Callieres (1645–1717) was a diplomatic envoy and man of letters who in 1716 published De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains. A Normand of literate and noble, but modest ancestry, he lived for many years in various parts of Europe before securing, somewhat late in a long life, a position in the service of Louis XIV. Although he won admission to the Académie Française for a panegyric on the King and published several other books including a noteworthy contribution to the ‘Battle of the Ancients and Moderns’, the high point in his sombre but determined life came during the Nine Years War when as a secret envoy he negotiated the crucial terms with the Dutch which led to the Congress of Ryswick (1697) and peace. Thereafter he held the sensitive position of secrétaire du cabinet at Versailles and supplied the secretary of state for foreign affairs with a flow of memoranda on the conditions of peace.

There can be few nineteenth-century figures whose papers and writings are so frequently consulted and quoted by historians as those of Francis Place, yet who have been so sadly neglected as historical figures. The only full-length study of Place's life and work, by Graham Wallas, is seventy-odd years old.2 It suffers from numerous defects, the two major of which are a tendency to show Place in an unduly favourable light and to make enormously lengthy quotations from Place's manuscripts, with very little criticism or analysis of their content or of the part which Place played in any given situation. The failure to look at Place's career and influence in the light of the views of his contemporaries inevitably means that Wallas's study is one-sided and incomplete as a biography and is only really useful as a selection from Place's writing, illustrating a number of the campaigns in which he played a part.

Following the Atterbury plot of 1722 the earl of Orrery, one of the prominent English Jacobites, told James III that they must bend all their efforts ‘to lull the Government asleep and make them believe there are no further thoughts of designs against them’. Their efforts were never to be realized, for to the English government ministerial idleness where Jacobites were concerned was a luxury it felt it could not afford. By 1716 the government had been made too well aware of the threat this group presented to its position. Reversal could only be avoided through close vigilance and the early detection of plot and conspiracy. Their earlier experiences of attempted plots, near assassinations, foreign aid, open rebellion, and the inability to gauge the movement's strength, created in the ministers between 1715 and 1745 an almost pathological fear of a Stuart restoration. It was never to subside but only to increase with each passing year, reaching its climax during the administration of Robert Walpole. Dissatisfaction with the existing system under the Hanoverians and the presence of an alternative choice on the continent were two facts that could not be overlooked. Jacobitism as a rallying cry for the disaffected in England, Ireland, and Scodand was an obvious reality. Each ministry, in varying degrees, pursued what appeared to it to be the hideous, all-pervasive force of Jacobitism – a force that seemed to assume infinite proportions the less visible it was to the eye. Jacobites must be hunted out, their secrets penetrated, their plans squashed. The best evidence of this pre-occupation of the government with fear of a Stuart restoration lies in an examination of its methods of securing intelligence through the post office, the employment of spies, and personal interviews with the Jacobites themselves.

The movement for imperial federation has traditionally been regarded as a late nineteenth century phenomenon, which grew out of a supposed reaction against earlier ‘anti-imperialism’. J. E. Tyler set out to trace its growth ‘from its first beginnings… in and around 1868’. Historians were aware of the suggestions made before the American War of Independence that the colonies should send M.P.s to Westminster, but tended to dismiss them as of antiquarian rather than historical interest. A few also noted apparently isolated discussions of some Empire federal connexion in the first half of the nineteenth century, but no attempt was made to establish the existence of a continuous sentiment before 1870. C. A. Bodelsen did no more than list a series of examples he had discovered in the supposed age of anti-imperialism. In fact between 1820 and 1870 a debate about the federal nature of the Empire can be traced. Like the movement for imperial federation after 1870, there was only the vaguest unity of aim about the mid-century projects, and before 1870, as after, the idea was never consistently to the fore, but enjoyed short bursts of popularity. It is, however, fair to think of one single movement for a federal Empire throughout the nineteenth century. There is a clear continuity in ideas, in arguments, and in the people involved. Ideas of Empire federalism were influential, not so much for themselves as for their relationship to overall imperial thinking: to ignore the undercurrent of feeling for a united Empire is to distort the attitudes of many leading men. In the mid-nineteenth century general principles of imperial parliamentary union were argued chiefly from the particular case of British North America, the closest colonies to Britain and the most constitutionally advanced. This Canadian emphasis strengthened the analogies with the United States which occurred in any case.

Violence is the means of expression of men who lack any other, and is especially useful to the historian of an otherwise inarticulate working class, starving on die scraps which middle-class sources leave him. Everyman is anonymous, but becomes memorable in rebellion; and in die many memorable rebellions of nineteenth-century Europe, that self-proclaimed ‘age of revolution’, historians have rejoiced that trie poor had found voice in violence.

Weak states can control strong states, provided the weak can persuade the strong to admit, that they are vitally interested in their integrity and independence. In the late nineteentli century everybody understood the influence of the Ottoman Empire upon British policy, and the influence of Austria-Hungary upon Imperial German policy in the near east. In the heyday of the Great Powers of Europe it was not expected tliat orientals should aspire to similar influence: their futures would be decided by Europeans. Until the work of Robinson and Gallagher revealed the extent to which the khedive of Egypt controlled Lord Cromer, the history of late nineteenth century imperialism was written from this assumption.

From the time of Henry Grattan's pronouncement of 1791 that ‘the drinking of spirits’ had become ‘a great national evil’ to the conclusion of the Poor Law Report of 1837 that an Irishman could get ‘dead drunk for two pence', the problems of alcoholic production, consumption and controls plagued the Irish Government. In a country whose food supplies were often as precarious as its revenues, the brewing of beer and the distilling of spirits were enterprises as controversial as they were profitable. These industries, newly adapted to the large-scale production of the late eighteenth century, underwent rapid expansion during the first years of the Union despite restrictive taxation, periodic measures of prohibition and the persistent harping of temperance leaders. During this period Ireland became an exporter rather than an importer of alcoholic beverages and witnessed the development of a considerable number of licensed breweries and distilleries throughout the country.

Before I start I would like to express my gratitude to the Faculty Board of History who have entrusted me with the very interesting task of delivering this lecture and to Mrs Lindsay for handing me a copy of her article on the ‘Origin and Early Development of the Cambridge Historical Tripos’, which appeared in volume IX of the Cambridge Historical Journal. This article surely must remain the authoritative account of the early development of the Tripos. I owe much to it, as also to an anonymous set of notes on the changes in the Tripos up to 1932, which was discovered in the offices of the History Faculty. This I suspect to have been compiled by Ronald Balfour, a Fellow of King's and close friend of mine, who was killed in the last war. I need not say that neither Mrs Lindsay, nor the author of these notes is responsible for what follows.

In an article published in this journal several years ago Professor Vincent advanced the view that the Tories' triumph in Lancashire in 1868, when they won 22 out of 33 seats as against 12 out of 27 in 1865, was attributable less to the new franchise than to other changes in electoral arrangements, namely, boundary alterations and the creation of new seats.

In 1837 leading reformers in a number of England's rapidly growing but still archaically governed industrial cities began to agitate for the incorporation of their boroughs in accordance with the provisions of the Municipal Corporations Act passed two years before. Up until then little interest had been shown in the subject in the provinces, an attitude which is rather easier to understand than the sudden belated burst of enthusiasm. For, even after it had become clear in 1835 that the great reform bill had made some sort of municipal reform inevitable, Tory opponents of the measure had not given way without a struggle. By strictly limiting the powers of the reformed borough councils, by creating a property qualification for councillors, and by requiring the inhabitants of unincorporated cities to petition the Privy Council for a charter rather than, say, providing for automatic incorporation of parliamentary boroughs, they hoped to emasculate what they dared not destroy. In this they were remarkably successful. The borough councils remained hobbled for years because the powers of the variety of trusts which existed in most cities to take care of such things as paving, water supply, cleaning and general improvements were not handed over to the municipal authorities. And largely because of this even many reformers in the proud industrial cities of the north and midlands were often less than enthusiastic about getting a charter for their city. The prospect of replacing narrowly selected Court Leets and Boroughreeves with semi-democratically elected borough councils and mayors was appealing, but it had to be balanced against the fact that these councils would not supersede but merely take their place alongside already existing boards and commissions, with the result that the cost of local government was likely to go up. Looked at in this way there did not seem to be much in it, or at least not enough to make incorporation worth the fighting that would probably be necessary to secure it.

‘It is not easy to describe the mental life of a man who is neither expansive nor introspective’. Thus wrote T. P. O'Connor, one of Parnell's earliest biographers. Historians have never ceased to echo his lament, and however much they may have differed in their interpretation of Parnell, they have generally agreed that, while no Irish leader of the nineteenth century has been so intensively studied, none remains so enigmatic and inaccessible.

In the 1890s the concept of laissez-faire still dominated the attitude of the Foreign Office to the question of overseas loans and investment. Unlike its European counterparts, the British Government had no tradition of interference in the world of high finance, nor were there any formal channels of communication between die City and the Foreign Office whereby a community of interests might be established or policies correlated. In the mid-nineteenth century there had been little need for closer contact. The power of British finance had ensured ample opportunities for British investment in fields where foreign competition was virtually non-existent. Such communication as had been considered necessary could be effected through hints in speeches, social contacts, or personal relationships - strictly informal procedures which, apart from Disraeli&s bid for the Suez canal shares, had produced minor and unspectacular results.

The view that Lloyd George designed his ‘People's Budget’of 1909–10 so as to invite its rejection by the House of Lords has fallen very largely out of favour with scholars, and it is now generally accepted that he devised his Budget as an alternative to rather than as a means to a battle with the Lords. As argued by Roy Jenkins and others, Lloyd George assumed that the peers would not dare tamper with a finance bill, and he consequently looked to his Budget as a way around the veto of the Lords: by means of it he hoped to attain some radical objectives against the wishes of the Lords.

For liberals, especially those who kept to the pure doctrine of Cobden, Egypt became a test case in the 1870s. Disraeli's purchase of the Khedive Ismail's Suez Canal shares in 1875 made its annexation appear a possibility. Two years later Gladstone penned his eloquent warnings as to diis step in his ‘Aggression on Egypt’ article in the Nineteenth Century. The annexation or occupation of Egypt would be, he said, ‘die almost certain egg of a great African Empire that will grow and grow’ until Britain would have territory and commitments throughout die whole of die African continent, and consequent embroilments with France and die odier Powers. There would be no limit to die responsibilities Britain would have to undertake, dealing with ‘all oppression’, and undertaking die ‘entire taxation’. It would end forever die realization of diat lofty aim, die founding not of a terrestrial but a ‘moral empire’ - ‘the enthronement of diis idea of Public Right, as die governing idea of European policy’.