For all the recognition of the immense importance of Catholic Emancipation, both in itself and for what it is supposed to have led to (most notably, parliamentary reform), significant questions still surround it. Why, after Daniel O'Connell's victory in County Clare in June 1828 precipitated a crisis, did that crisis drag on for more than six months of perpetual wavering and mixed signals from the British government? Why was a cabinet not summoned? Why did the prime minister so long refuse either to confide in or to remove the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland? Finally, what was the likely effect of these months of shuffling and confusion in shaping the course of politics in the years to come?

The Duke of Wellington is central to answering such questions. Before 1828, Wellington was a key player whose doubts and fears were broadly representative of those that reshaped the positions of many of emancipation's most powerful opponents and brought them around to the necessity of accepting the measure. In 1828 and 1829 as prime minister, Wellington made decisions that were critical in determining how the measure would be carried. Some of those decisions had an important bearing on how emancipation was received in the country and therefore on the political divisions that followed.

The explanation usually given for the government's failure to act is that the king refused to permit it and would not allow the cabinet to consider the matter. In January, when the king asked Wellington to form a government, he had stipulated and the duke had agreed that Catholic Emancipation should not be a government measure.

Eric Hobsbawm recently observed that “a good deal of economics has the function not so much of telling government or business what they ought to do, as of telling them what they are doing (or not doing) is right.” Economic history, happily or unhappily, does not suffer from the same weakness. Its problem is rather the reverse: a good deal of economic history has the didactic function of telling us what should have been done, as though that were always possible. So it is with the critics of the Lloyd George coalition's postwar economic policies; they work from a retrospectively-divined ideal back to an explanation for the coalition's melancholic failure to grasp and pursue that ideal. This has made for portrayals of the untried paths as relatively unobstructed, clearly marked and negotiable, while the route actually taken is seen as a gamut, bordered by briars and surfaced with quagmires, through which the nation emerged badly scathed and shaken. To veer off the course of this prickly metaphor, the critics of the coalition's refusal to deflate or its negligence – one might almost say abandon – toward inflation and permissiveness make two types of arguments.

Most conspicuous by their unmitigated scorn are the socialists who see in the wartime state the first buds of what a socialist Britain could flower into.

John Evans, Moderation Stated, 1682.

The ironic fate of Absalom and Achitophel is to be fully appreciated as one of the great political poems of the language and only partially comprehended as political argument. Recent criticism of the poem is marked by a widening discrepancy between the ways in which it is understood as verbal and as political artifact. Metaphor and allusion have been carefully and often subtly charted, yet the poem's political rhetoric and its political argument are assumed to be simple coordinates. The tensions, indeed the contradictions, between explicit language and implicit argument are not only unexamined but largely unperceived. The conventional reading, which has become an almost fixed critical response, argues that the poem rises above partisan politics, that it derives from a political intelligence committed to a conservative ideology but indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, the “party color'd mind.”

Generalities about Dryden's temper, the poet as philosophical sceptic, as disinterested critic of extremes, together with the seemingly ingenuous and repeated claims of moderation and balance in the Preface have led a number of critics to understand the narrator's espoused moderation as Dryden's political stance—a judgment which Dryden's contemporaries certainly did not allow.

Sir Geoffrey Elton has breathed new life into the putrefying corpse of Elizabethan parliamentary history. In conjunction with others, notably Michael Graves, Norman Jones, and David Dean, he has succeeded in demolishing the standard interpretation of high politics, spirited opposition, and principled conflict perfected by Sir John Neale. Elton's analysis of the early Elizabethan Parliaments provides, for the first time, the detailed revisionist argument, one capable in many respects, moreover, of logical extension over the remainder of the reign and buttressed by a series of general overviews. For all the necessary emphasis on cooperation, bill procedure, and “business as usual,” Elton is well aware that politics intruded on legislative affairs, and at no time was this more obvious than during the troubled 1566 session. Neale had devoted forty-seven printed pages to his interpretation of constitutional crisis during these three months. Elton provides a far briefer, more taut, coverage but nonetheless the session figures very prominently in his portrayal of “great affairs.” It is not the intention of this article to dispute Elton's general interpretation of a political crisis orchestrated in good measure by privy councillors intent on exerting pressure on the queen to settle the succession issue. That portrayal is sensible and, in its broad outlines, generally supported by the known evidence. Nevertheless, in his desire to purge Neale's interpretations from the corpus of Elizabethan parliamentary history, Sir Geoffrey has, in a number of instances, permitted his arguments and beliefs to outrun his evidence. These occasions are important for the understanding of events and themes within Parliament.

Political history is the record of the pursuit and exercise of state power. In a democracy the search for such authority usually begins with the contest of elections. Elections, as a consequence, are of great importance and their systematic analysis, particularly the extrapolation of conclusions about popular attitudes from their results, has achieved in the last few years the status of a separate scholarly craft.

Historians have their own way of explaining elections. Traditionally, they tend to concentrate upon comparisons of programs and of party leaders. They assume the electorate made a choice between platforms and personalities and they tend to explain observable results in terms of most easily demonstrable causes. In dealing with the British General Election of 1945, for instance, they argue that the Labor party won because voters found its program more believable than that of the other party. This explanation, of course, is tautological. One is reminded of Calvin Coolidge who explained his victory in the race for governor of Massachusetts by saying that he received the most votes.

Yet of all elections in the twentieth century, the poll of 1945 needs critical investigation. The importance of its results have obscured the complexities of the election itself; historians have been so fascinated by what Labor did in office that they have ignored how the party got there. Labor's victory was as unprecedented as it was unexpected. As neither Churchill nor the leaders of the Labor party could believe, even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that the electorate would dismiss the man who had led Britain through the war, the mystery of the election derives not from the Labor victory but from the breakdown of understanding between the leaders of the nation and its citizenry.

Various scholars have discussed, for particular elections, the court's role as an electoral patron. However, their work has, of necessity, left unanswered several significant questions about such patronage. It is clear that, by the elections of 1640, issues of a more “national” importance had a strong impact on the success or failure of the court's electioneering. But the questions remain. Were the elections of 1640 unique or can traces of such agitation over matters of more than local concern be found in earlier elections? And did the issues of early Stuart politics, religious reform, the alleged growth of recusant sympathies, the foreign policies followed by James I and Charles I, and the financial expedients practiced by Charles I, have any significant effect on the court's electoral influence? Perhaps, by reviewing the influence of the Lord Wardens of the Cinque Ports between 1604 and 1628, a few answers may be suggested and a clearer picture of the electoral practices of the court may emerge.

England's traditional bridge to Europe, the Cinque Ports — a misleading title since there were actually seven — held fast to their special privileges, their own unique organization, franchise and courts. They returned fourteen burgesses, or “barons” as they were uniquely called, to parliament. The Lord Warden, however, enjoyed considerable influence over them. He was Constable of Dover Castle, his administrative headquarters, and acted as a sheriff for the ports, which were outside county jurisdiction. More importantly, the Lord Warden was the voice of the Cinque Ports at court.

This article examines marginalia as a form of radical writing practice in the period immediately after the First World War. It focuses specifically on a densely annotated copy of the second part of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's My Diaries, which covers on 1900–1914 and was published in 1920. The annotator, John Arthur Fallows (1864–1935), was a former Church of England clergyman and Independent Labour Party politician, and the article asks what motivated him to leave such an explicit record of his engagement with the book in its margins. Blunt recast his original diary entries to show how the outbreak of the First World War had arisen from the prewar imperialist policies of the Entente. Fallows, meanwhile, used his copy of My Diaries to inscribe a permanent record of his responses to Blunt's writing, which were shaped by his own memories of prewar radical-left political action. The dual record of textual engagement that can be recovered from this copy of My Diaries provides insight into how two British radicals “read” the causes of the First World War in the period between the Armistice and the conclusion of the Paris Peace Accords.