George Dangerfield's book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, would have been an influential, indeed a seminal, piece of historical writing whenever it had appeared: published in 1935 it constituted an immense liberation. In 1935 the writing of modern British political history was dominated for academic people by Lewis Namier, whose two great works—The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution—had been published in 1928 and 1930. Namier's immense gifts were balanced by a startling defect. He was psychologically incapable of writing historical narrative, that is of dealing on any considerable scale with the development of events. Here, at the very start of the Namierite era, was a young scholar named Dangerfield writing history in the classic manner, writing, that is, as Thucydides and Tacitus had done, with a wide narrative sweep about the fateful and tragic events of yesterday. The result was the book which was so eloquently analysed this afternoon. It has been issued, if I heard this rightly, some nineteen times; and three editions, two American and one British, are in print today, after fifty years.

At the end of his life Disraeli, by then Lord Beaconsfield, congratulated Matthew Arnold on having “coined unforgettable phrases.” Mr. Dangerfield may surely be offered the same congratulations. In the week in which I was composing this paper the Spectator of London carried an article under the headline: “The Strange Death of Liberal America”; and I note that a work will be published in London this September entitled “The Strange Rebirth of Liberal England.” Where the phrasing of the title is concerned we may be celebrating tonight, not only a jubilee, but the ghost of a centenary. When Mr. Dangerfield chose his arresting title he echoed, unwittingly as we understand, one devised fifty years earlier; for in 1885 a young British journalist in India named Rudyard Kipling had written a story entitled: “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes.”

One of the most famous results of the Norman Conquest was the creation of honors, the sometimes vast collections of land given by William the Conqueror to leading followers. These followers then gave land to the Church and subinfeudated land to their own followers, who often granted away land themselves; indeed, the chain of generosity sometimes continued through several levels. Because subinfeudation and alienation of land were so intimately bound up in the creation of English “feudalism” and the development of English land law, scholars have long recognized the importance of this process. Despite great scholarly interest in the process, however, little work has been done to track and quantify the amount of subinfeudation and alienation on secular honors over a long period of time. Scholars have used Domesday Book to produce pertinent figures, but because so much subinfeudation and alienation occurred on the great honors after 1086 such figures tell us little about how much of their land tenants-in-chief granted away and how much they kept over the long haul. Moreover, they tell us little about subinfeudation and alienation of land by rear vassals.

In the year 1676 there appeared on the London stage a new kind of comedy. The play was The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell; and the new element was its satire on the contemporary amateur scientist called a “virtuso.”

Shadwell's play marked the beginning of a trend. For the next hundred years the “virtuoso” became a familiar figure in English literature. He was described, mocked, praised and lectured in plays, poems, and essays. He attracted the attention and interest of such authors as Dryden, Addison, Swift. Pope, Akenside, Johnson, and Shenstone.

Exactly what was a virtuoso? Originally he was a Renaissance gentleman of wealth and leisure who, inspired by the revival of classical learning, became a collector of Greek and Roman antiquities — paintings, sculptures, coins, and medals. His motives were varied: partly sheer curiosity and delight in knowledge for its own sake; partly the need for occupation as an escape from boredom and melancholy. But it must be genteel occupation: one suited to his class and fortune, divorced from manual labor or money-grubbing, and from any kind of practical utility. The reputation to be gained by a note-worthy collection furnished added incentive. Finally, sensibility played a part: the romantic desire for “some living contact, however vicarious, with the heroes of old, classical and national.”

The articles that follow employ quantitative and prosopographical approaches that, although not new to historical investigation, are new to the field of royal-baronial relations in Norman England. Traditionally, English medieval politics have been treated with a strongly constitutional emphasis. Barons have been viewed as a largely undifferentiated group whose relations with the monarchy were seen as a reaction against the advance of rational central government, or as a defense of traditional liberties against oppressive kings.

The better historians, over the past century and more, have resisted such simplifications. John Horace Round, for example, attacked and ridiculed the anachronistic constitutional generalizations of some of his predecessors by producing a mass of detailed information on individual Anglo-Norman aristocratic families. Sir Frank Stenton, in a tribute to Round written soon after Round's death in 1928, summarized his contribution in these apt words:

Stenton, too, was an expert in aristocratic genealogy and family history; and with the sources of Saxon and Norman England at his fingertips, he was a master of the apt illustration.

In the past two decades Lord John Russell has suffered a decline in reputation which is undeserved. This has been especially true in regard to his role as foreign secretary in the second Palmerston government. The decline has not resulted from significant new evidence or from a new insight into existing evidence, so much as from a series of apparently accidental circumstances. The most important of these have been the fact that the only recent biography of Russell, by John Prest, placed little stress either on foreign affairs or on his post-1852 career, expressing the belief that he “should have retired” at the end of his first administration.

Prest's influence has been intensified by several major studies of foreign policy, which have given a negative interpretation of Russell's role under Palmerston. Since each of these is the most important work on the topic concerned, their view of Lord John carries considerable weight. Yet, even more than was the case with Prest's biography, their comments about Russell appear on a very few pages, and suggest that the authors viewed the issue of Lord John's relationship with Palmerston as tangential to their research or analysis. The evidence they cite often falls into two categories: 1) statements of biased observers, who had grudges against Russell, or 2) material that is open to other interpretation or is an inadequate and misleading sample of the evidence available.

When Sir Richard Southern wanted to illustrate the moral compromise that was the inevitable cost of being a courtier and servant of King Henry I of England—the culture of whose court encouraged profiteering and sharp practice—he found the material to hand in a number of surviving letters of the unfortunate Nigel d'Aubigny. At some time between 1109 and 1114 Nigel fell ill, and he believed himself dying. He dictated to his royal master a letter—on which one can almost see the spots of the tears—begging him to confirm the restorations of land that he wanted now to make to various churches he had formerly deprived. Another letter was to his brother, listing further—rather weighty—restorations he wanted made to numerous laymen likewise defrauded by him in the course of his career. Perhaps he felt rather silly when he got better, as he did, and lived for many years more to meditate on his unworthiness.

Sir Richard proved his point, but it occurs to me that the same evidence can be used to explore further a different but related issue: how it was that these men who lived and worked in Henry's service were so very conscious of the moral compromises they had made. If Nigel d'Aubigny was brought to the state that his letters reveal that he was, when he was threatened by death, it can only be because he had been aware of actions that might be considered his sins for quite some while.

When Mary queen of Scots met her first Parliament, she encountered an institution that had long played an influential part in Scottish history. The Scottish Parliament was important for its legislation and taxation, but it was even more important as the forum in which the political community assembled to take major decisions about how the government should be configured. This article uses a newly-discovered list of those attending the Parliament of 1563 as the starting-point for an investigation of the political community in Mary's reign.

Although our understanding of sixteenth-century politics has been much enhanced by studies focused on “kingship,” many crucial issues concern relationships among people other than the king. For more than half of the century there was no adult monarch present, and government had to be carried on by consensus between a regent and the nobility. Adult monarchs usually had more power than temporary regents, but they, too, had to seek consensus if they were to rule successfully.

There is an important collection of videotaped interviews with British historians that is now available in London. The Publications Department of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) has produced twenty-eight videotaped interviews with prominent historians in Britain. More tapes are to be released with others scheduled for production in the future. The historians who have already been interviewed are senior British historians who have made their scholarly contributions since World War II. All the interviews are conducted by younger colleagues who have specialized in the same or related fields of history. Interviewers explore the influences that have shaped the work of the senior historians and encourage the latter to reflect upon their background, training, publications, and careers. Because the historians are selected by an IHR committee, the members of which are mostly economic historians, senior social and economic historians have been more fully represented in the IHR videotapes than other historians. Of the twenty-eight interviews, fifteen of the historians have written mostly about the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), eight are historians of the early modern period (from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries), three are medievalists, one is a classicist, and one is a historian of science. Concluding this article is an alphabetical list of all the historians interviewed in this series.

In 1922 the Irish Free State began life with a constitution which embodied two contradictory principles. The first recognized that all powers of government derive from the people and provided for a system of government in which the Irish Cabinet was clearly responsible to the popularly elected Irish lower house, Dail Eireann. The second recognized a monarch, King George V, as head of the Irish executive, with substantial prerogative powers derived not from the Irish people but from British common law. The constitution was a compromise between Britain and Irish republicans to end the Irish War of Independence. Though not every compromise in politics makes complete sense, for Britain this one represented more than a short-range expedient. Its contradictions represented the dying gasp in a long, often anguished, and ultimately futile attempt by Britain to devise a formula which would simultaneously permit the Irish a measure of self-government and protect vital British interests in Ireland.

This essay will review the attempts to construct a satisfactory Anglo-Irish relationship in the years between 1782 and 1949. It will concentrate on four models of government proposed for Ireland: (a) the independent Irish Parliament of the period from 1782 to 1800, (b) O'Connell's proposals to repeal the union with Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, (c) the devolution proposed in the home rule bills of 1886, 1893, 1912, and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, and (d) the independence provided in the Irish Free State constitution of 1922 and its successor, the Irish constitution of 1937. It will also place these models in the context of the constitutional evolution of the British Empire. In the Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, and South African colonies, colonial self-government and British imperial interests were reconciled, beginning in Nova Scotia in 1848, by using a kind of constitutional double-think involving the Crown and the colonial Governor. But the problem of the troubled Anglo-Irish relationship could not be resolved so easily.