Whereas both Houses of the Parliament of England have been necessitated to undertake a war in their just and lawful defense … all oaths, declarations, and proclamations against both or either of the Houses of Parliament … or their ordinances and proceedings, or any for adhering unto them, or for doing or executing any office, place or charge, by any authority derived from them; and all judgments, indictments, outlawries, attainders and inquisitions in any the said causes … be declared null, suppressed, and forbidden. (From the first of nineteen Newcastle Propositions, July 1646; expanded from the first of twenty-seven Propositions of Uxbridge, November 1644; repeated in the second of The Four Bills, December 1647)

Indemnity Committee cases from the 1647–55 manuscripts indicate a widespread volume of suits pressed against parliament's Civil War and Commonwealth officeholders. Invariably, the officials petitioning the Indemnity Committee were under prosecution. Often they had been fined and even jailed. Also revealed in these papers is a public knowledgeable in the law and ready to wield its power in punishing an array of officials in London and the shires. Four broad conclusions are asserted here. First, the Indemnity Committee records reflect a massive legal assault on state officials from the beginning of the Civil War to the mid-1650s, a factor in the political, administrative, and social history of the period that has heretofore been ignored. Second, suits were lodged mainly as the result of actions stemming from fiscal innovations put into place by a parliament that pushed toward victory and then struggled to pay its war debts.

It has long been a critical obligation for commentators on the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to remark on Edward Gibbon's failure to explain the reasons for that fall. Historians in particular have been bothered by this: both J. B. Black and D. M. Low have fretted over Gibbon's refusal — or inability — to deal with the ultimate meaning of the events he describes or, in the last three volumes, to “propound and answer questions explicitly.” Readers of the History, on the other hand, may feel that the historian belabors too often the “causes” of events, those “connections in a sequence.” Regularly, Gibbon reminds us that he is dealing with a process of degeneration involving successive stages of decay; and both within individual sections and at the close of units, he carefully recapitulates that the policies of Augustus or Septimius Severus, the strengthening of the Pretorian Guard, the spread of Christianity, the weakening of senatorial authority, monetary and land policies, the invasions of the Goths and Huns were all “causes” for the decline of the Roman Empire.

The contradiction between the reactions of critic and casual reader is merely apparent. His commentators grant that Gibbon assayed explanations for the events he recounted; but, they say, his purported “causes” are not primary or even secondary ones. They claim, in fact, that the explanations seldom account for the single chains of events he describes, much less for the long, intricate process that Gibbon sees as steady and unmitigated decline.

This review article has a conventional purpose, namely, to assess the contributions made by thirteen recent books, most by British historians, to the history of British foreign policy and the European states system during the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and post-Napoleonic eras. There is, however, a problem. None of the books is conventional diplomatic history. Almost half relate only indirectly to foreign policy, while for the remainder foreign policy constitutes only part of their subject matter. The review therefore consciously runs two risks: that of judging the books by inappropriate standards and that of drawing conclusions about current historiography in this field and period from an inappropriate sample. The reader will have to judge whether the results justify the procedure.

Geoffrey Best's War and Society in Revolutionary Europe illustrates the problem. Best clearly succeeds in his goal of going beyond the study of military organizations to the study of war itself as a “unique human interest and activity.” The book is far-ranging, delightfully written, based on wide reading, and packed with insights. It also contributes substantially to the history of international politics, mainly by demonstrating how powerful an impact armies and combat had. Yet from the political historian's standpoint there is ground for some frustration as well as for pleasure. Best's descriptions of how armies developed from the Old Regime into the nineteenth century and his analyses of the impact of war in 1792–1815 are excellent for France and Britain and adequate for Prussia and Spain.

Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, like most other Restoration politicians, has suffered from a bad press. He has always been spoken of slightingly by what J. P. Kenyon calls the “bed-spring and chamber-pot” school of Restoration historians; and for once the serious scholars have agreed with the romancers. David Ogg, for instance, says of Arlington, “He had the gift for making the right friends and discarding them at the right moment; but as he lacked courage, he never rose to real greatness among the bad men of Charles's Court. … Always civil and obliging, his chief talent was that of anticipating and fostering what he thought to be the secret wishes of his royal master.” Arlington's biographer, Miss Violet Barbour, says nothing quite so harsh as that, but her implied opinion is clearly not very high. Of modern historians only Keith Feiling, in his work on British foreign policy from 1660 to 1672, is at all favorable. Most of Arlington's British contemporaries took an equally critical view of him. The attacks of Burnet and Clarendon are well known. Here is what the Duke of Buckingham, Arlington's great rival in the Cabal, had to say in his poem, “Advice to a Painter To Draw my L. A-----ton, Grand Minister of State”:

First draw an arrant fop, from top to toe

Whose very looks at first dash shew him so:

Two goggle-eyes, so clear, tho' very dead,

That one may see, thro' them, quite thro' his Head.

Let every nod of his, and subtle wink

Declare the fool would talk, but cannot think.

Let him all other fools so far surpasse

That fools themselves point at him for an ass.

Whether all this denigration is entirely deserved is open to serious doubt. Foreign observers had no such low opinion of Arlington. When he became secretary of state in 1662, the Venetian resident described him as "a man of wit and ability, affable and courteous, possessing several languages, . . . and competent for his position from his knowledge of the interests of foreign princes." And nine years later another Venetian resident called him "tried and prudent."

The reissue after twenty years of G. H. Guttridge's study, English Whiggism and the American Revolution, is very welcome. In many of its judgments this lucid, aseptic dissection of the ideas, attitudes, and policies of the opposition groups in British politics during the period of the Revolution bids fair to stand the test of a much longer period of time than has elapsed since its first appearance in 1942. The virile political traditions (some still traceable in modern British practice) which Hanoverian England inherited from the whiggism of the seventeenth century contained not one but several potentially competing principles; and the great strength of this study lies in the author's exposition of the ways in which these divergent principles were taken up by different political groups, with the effect of determining the stand taken by each, both on the American question and on concurrent issues of domestic politics. In Locke's writings radicals found justification for the creed of personality as the basis of political rights. All groups drew from them a belief that Parliament had an essential role in maintaining “the contractual obligation of monarchy to preserve certain fundamental rights,” but more than one principle followed from this premise. In the minds of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and his friends, it was combined with pre-Lockeian concepts of fundamental law as an element in the constitution beyond the power of Parliament to alter. For the leaders and members of the Rockingham connection, Parliament's role was seen in, and secured by, its supremacy.