The following paper contains the results of an independent study of an episode in the commercial history of this country which has been the subject of some important researches during recent years. The beginnings of mercantile adventure in Russia and other regions of Northern Europe and the Far East have been related by contemporary men of action, most of whose narratives have been carefully edited in the Hakluyt Series; but the political and economic environment of the Muscovy Company itself was still in need of elucidation from contemporary State Papers and other records. Some of these sources have been used by Madame Lubimenko, Dr. A. J. Gerson and Mr. O. T. Williams for special aspects of the subject; but a large mass of material of the first importance has remained untouched.

Historians should be grateful to President Cleveland. It was his insistence on the arbitration of the dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the boundary of British Guiana that led to an intensive search in Spanish, Dutch, British and other archives for the evidence of European activities between the Amazon and the Orinoco during the three centuries after the discovery of America. The documents so found and printed are essential for any understanding of the historical background of the Anglo-Venezuelan dispute and of great interest to the colonial historian in general.

It is perhaps more usual for the giver of the Prothero lecture to choose a subject which has been a part of his intellectual baggage for a long time. In contrast, what I am about to offer falls more honesdy into the category of work in progress. I am presendy at a very preliminary stage in a project that may both take me a long time and lead me up many alleyways. I am concerned to understand how the Catholic Reform of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was funded. In the term ‘Cadiolic Reform’ are included charitable and educative initiatives, the funding of missions, the conversion of die heathen, the expansion of religious orders, die provision of books and images (biblia pauperurm) to improve and elevate the minds of the simple into mysteries they could not otherwise conceptualise, and die erection and furnishing of new churches. I would argue that taken as a package this funding process, about which I will be presently more specific, represents one of the largest private money-raising processes ever undertaken. It has, perhaps, a particular interest today when attempts are being made to reinvigorate die spirit of private philanthropy and to dismande or cause to wither away public commitment to assistance or subsidy.

The Lenthall family acquired Latchford in Oxfordshire by marriage in the fifteenth century and settled there. They were lesser gentry, but Thomas Lenthall was M.P. for Oxford in 1542 and John Lenthall—the elder brother of the Speaker of the Long Parliament—was made marshal of the King's Bench prison and knighted in 1616, and he married a daughter of the Temples of Stowe. Before the Civil War at least the family might be said to belong to the rising gentry. Sir John was alleged to be corrupt and extortionate as marshal, accepting money for the improper release of prisoners. But as early as 1645 he was being harried by his creditors, and a substantial part of the estate was under mortgage in the early 1660s. The debts do not appear to have arisen directly from the Civil Wars—in which the senior line of the family took no active part—but may have been the result of Sir John's exceptionally large family. In 1678 his grandson and successor, William, raised money by a method which indicated severe financial difficulties, the sale of an annuity for twenty-one years, and in 1679 his second wife's family found him a Parliamentary seat at Wallingford to enable him to evade his creditors. In the early 1680s the various debts on the estate were bought up by Sir John Cutler, the wealthy money-lender and the hero of Wycherley's Praise of Avarice, and in 1685 were consolidated in a single mortgage of all Lengthall's propery, including his profits from the King's Bench prison, for £12,000. The rate of interest was 5½ per cent, a high rate for the period, and after 1689 the interest fell into arrears, so that by 1700 there was owing on account of this debt over £20,000. In addition, in the 1690s William incurred judgment debts of some £6,500 to two Londoners, and in 1700 had to give these creditors a second mortage on his assets. Thus by 1700 the total of his debts was well in excess of the capital value of his property, and the income from the estate was in the hands of Sir John Cutler's executors and heirs who attempted to foreclose the equity of redemption in order to sell the estate. Their attempt was frustrated by the death in 1702—in the midst of these proceedings—of William without direct issue, but leaving as his legal heirs the descendants of his numerous aunts, some living beyond the sea and others, though in England, untraceable. For this reason two private Acts of Parliament were obtained vesting the equity of redemption of the Lenthall estate in trustees to sell in order to discharge the debts secured on it.

Ten years ago a well-known Swiss writer on Middle Eastern affairs published an article on patriotism and nationalism among the Arabs. Discussing the attitude of nationalists to the past, and their tendency to substitute fanciful constructions for serious history, he quotes ‘a high Syrian government official’ as saying, ‘in deadly earnest’: ‘If the Mongols had not burnt the libraries of Baghdad in the 13 th century, we Arabs would have had so much science, that we would long since have invented the atomic bomb. The plundering of Baghdad put us back by centuries.’

The place-names which illustrate the character of Anglo-Saxon heathenism have a special claim on the attention of historians. To scholars such as Bede, who wrote when English paganism was still within the range of living memory, it was a detestable superstition, which could not be ignored, but should not be described. Eighth-century writers, and, in particular, Bede, have preserved the names of a number of heathen gods, and recorded the occasion of a number of heathen festivals; they refer to temples, to idols, to altars, and to sacrifices, and their language suggests the existence of different ranks within the heathen priesthood. But it is only a dim impression of the pagan foreworld which can be recovered from their writings, and the points at which it can be reinforced by quotation from later authorities are very few.

Of all the myriad projects to restore the House of Stuart that known as the Elibank Plot is by no means the least interesting, and it is certainly the most obscure. So little, indeed, has it been regarded in the past that few historians have thought it worthy even of mention, though it does in fact throw considerable light, not only upon the political situation in Great Britain during the years that immediately followed Culloden, but also upon the intrigues of the leading Powers in the period preceding the Diplomatic Revolution. In view, therefore, of the obscurity in which this conspiracy has hitherto been shrouded, I must crave your permission to give some account of the authorities upon which my interpretation of it is based.

What, if anything, do historians and theorists of international relations owe to the theories and practices of the Middle Ages? This paper traces a number of themes that were intensely debated by theologians during the fourteenth century, tracking especially two different approaches to ‘the political’ on the part of neo-Augustinian voluntarists on the one hand and neo-Aristotelian intellectualists on the other. In the scholastic attempts to answer the question: ‘What are we presumed to be? And, in consequence, what is the scope of politics?’, their different views concerning the consequences of what Christians call ‘Original Sin’ and ‘the Fall’ are highlighted. Especially, the position of the voluntarists is shown to have been taken up not least by the Master of the Modern: Hobbes. The neo-Augustinian voluntarists can thereafter be seen to have provided some of the same arguments that have recently been rehearsed by contemporary ‘realist’ critics of modern liberalism who, it is argued, are negotiating the medieval in the modern.

After a period of comparative neglect, the ecclesiastical history of the Restoration has recently again attracted the attention of historians. Dr.Bosher's Making of the Restoration Settlement has luminously exposed the politics by which the Church of England recaptured the establishment, and Mr. A. G. Matthews, by tracing the biographies of the Anglicans displaced during the Interregnum and the Non-Anglicans ejected after the king's return, has shown how changes in doctrine and discipline affected the ministry during these years. Here an attempt will be made to discuss another aspect of the re-establishment: its administrative reconstruction. Dr.Bosher has shown how the exigencies of politics led to the piecemeal restoration of Anglicanism, instead of the immediate ecclesiastical revolution which, from a legal point of view, could have been attempted. That the traditional episcopal administration was thereby eventually reconstructed is of course well known, but it seems worth asking what light the administrative records of certain dioceses can throw not only on the details of how this took place, but also on the structure and character of the revived system.

‘Remember’, King Alfred wrote to his bishops, sending them a copy of the translation he had made of Pope Gregory the Great's Cura pastoralis, ‘remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men’. To remedy the twofold disaster consequent on this intellectual and pedagogic failure – not just the ransacking of the churches throughout England and loss of their treasures and books, but, worse, the loss to the English of the wisdom the books had preserved – King Alfred arranged to have the young men among his subjects taught to read in the vernacular. Set-texts for this programme were to be supplied by the translating of ‘certain books which are the most necessary for all men to know’. Among these was Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, generally thought to have been translated by the king himself and to include some of Alfred's own musings. Towards the end of his text in the context of a discussion of the nature of God, eternity and the place of humanity in the divine plan, Alfred had Wisdom declare: ‘we can know very little concerning what was before our time, except through memory and inquiry, and even less concerning what comes after us. Only one thing is certainly present to us, namely that which now exists. But to God all is present, what was before, what is now, and what shall be after us. The central point at issue here is the disjunction between what an omniscient deity and frail humanity can know of the past, but it usefully introduces this discussion by linking the process of obtaining information about the past with that of personal memory.

It is often said that if Oliver Cromwell had lived longer the Puritan Revolution could have survived. The monarchical component of protectoral rule, and the protector's endeavours to broaden the base of his regime, are taken to have signalled a return towards normality and thus towards stability. That mood has been contrasted with the self-destruction of the revolution in the two years after Cromwell's death, a period of twilit anarchy which only the restoration of the Stuarts could end. That interpretation has its points but is misleadingly one-sided. The protectorate had frailties which it never overcame. It failed to live down its origins in the military coups of 1653. Those episodes affronted principles of civilian rule and parliamentary supremacy which commanded widespread support but which have been obscured by the ‘revisionist’ trend of parliamentary history. Though he aimed at ‘healing and settling’, the protector healed little and settled nothing. His attempts to woo mainstream opinion were unsuccessful. In so far as he won its compliance or tolerance, the achievement was conditional upon his readiness to submit to the principles of rule which his seizure of power had broken. It was a condition he could not or would not meet. By the end of his life, military obstruction to civilian and parliamentary rule had reduced his regime to paralysis, and had deepened the divisions between civilian and military aspirations that would soon bring down his successor and would destroy each of the fleeting regimes that followed.

The opening years of the fifteenth century witnessed an outburst of lawlessness at sea of such intensity that legitimate commerce between the kingdoms of France and England, and their allies, all but ceased. Official contemporary sources seem to leave no doubt as to the causes of this outburst. The truce conservators of the two kingdoms were in full agreement in placing the blame for the outrages against merchant shipping on the activities of ‘piratae’, ‘depraedatores’ and ‘banniti’, outlaws working without the sanction and beyond the control of their governments. Modern authorities have accepted this ‘official’ explanation without question.

You must pardon me if my observations this afternoon betray, in a more marked degree than you may think appropriate in the President of your Society, the diffidence which is born of surprise. For it was a genuine surprise to me when in the course of last summer the Council of the Royal Historical Society did me the honour of nominating me their President—a nomination which you have now been good enough to confirm—in the place of a predecessor of high distinction. I was aware that before him this office had been filled by men of eminence either as historians or among those who have signally contributed to the making of history. The earliest name on the list is, I believe, that of an English classic whose venerated figure stands on a pillar ‘wrought full sternely’ among those consecrate in the House of Fame to illustrious historians, near the place of honour belonging to Gibbon himself. For, unlike to one another as he and Grote were from most points of view of philosophical thought, of political principle, and of literary taste, more than one analogy is traceable between the growths of their respective masterpieces. Each was the work of its author's mature manhood; each was carried out consecutively, with that consciousness of the goal in view which proportionates effort to progress, and within a limit of years far outside of which unity of execution is virtually impossible. Thus, though in both instances the historian's conception of his theme was not only vast and comprehensive, but confessedly grew under his hands into its ultimate shape, the complete edifice stood square to the elements, and in the mortar ‘which made the building sure’ the ingredient of civic experience had not been omitted.

My subject obviously deserves a skilled advocate to present it to the public, but as a professional historical student speaking to historical students I may be pardoned if I attempt only the plainest exposition, and ‘let me find a charter in your voice to assist my simpleness.’

ANY attempt to apply the same approach in the case of Cavaliers as I did with Puritans last year may seem doomed to inevitable failure. It will be considered futile to search for particular varieties of human temperament which inclined individuals towards adopting particular ideas and beliefs of a broadly conservative persuasion. Left-wing intellectuals, historians included, have sometimes been reluctant to admit that instinctive, emotional conservatism can be held to constitute a system of ideas at all, as opposed to a welter of prejudices and vested interests. Correspondingly, for many people of conservative views, acceptance of the world of order, hierarchy and inequality broadly as they find it—not necessarily as the best of all possible worlds but as the least bad of all realisable ones—is so obviously sensible as to need no intellectual defence or justification. None the less, not all the royalists of 1641–2 and after were unthinking conservatives, with the smallest of small ‘c’s, or at any rate not in the same sense. Not all professed the same religious tenets; not all adhered to the same constitutional principles; not all came to be royalists in the same way and at the same time. So some modest analysis of the Cavalier party in terms of what may be called ideological temperament is, I hope, worth undertaking. Not that the royalist cause has lacked its apologists, from the greatest of seventeenth-century historians to our own day. Few, however, have paused to consider the kind of people who became Cavaliers and their probable motivation.

At a time when Anglo-Russian relations show a great difficulty in being re-established after the Russian revolution of 1917, it may be of special interest to look back to a very far past in English history, when England, after having fought for freedom under the leadership of Parliament against the Stuart despotism, had created by a bloody act a republic, which was taken by Protector Cromwell into his strong hands and existed for years, until death removed his grip. Then another Charles Stuart was restored to the throne which his father had left for the scaffold.

The life of Robert I, king of Scots, written by John Barbour archdeacon of Aberdeen is the fullest of any medieval king in the west, a chronicle of chivalry in vernacular octosyllabic couplets, on which much of our understanding of the events and ethos of the Scottish war depends. In this paper I discuss some aspects of the king's reign which Barbour ignored: pro-Balliol sentiment which lingered in Scotland and at the French and papal courts; and also aspects of the war where Barbour's narrative is incomplete or misleading, but which illustrate the growth of King Robert's military effort from that of a very uncertain factional rising to one which matched the rhetorical claims (in die Declaration of Arbroath) of a people at war. I shall be treading ground already mapped in Professor Barrow's masterly study, seeking only to point out features to which Barbour has, by omission or commission, drawn my attention.

The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, established in 1536, liberally educated the sons of Nahua (Aztec) leaders in New Spain. Its Franciscan pedagogues, including Bernardino de Sahagún (c. 1499–1590), Andrés de Olmos (1491–1571) and Juan Bautista (c. 1555–1606/13), worked with indigenous students and alumni to collect, edit and circulate Nahuatl huehuetlahtolli, or ‘speech of the ancients’. This paper examines the largest collection of these orations printed in pre-modern Mexico, the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] edited by Juan Bautista and indigenous intellectuals from the college. It argues that the Tlatelolcans adapted Nahuatl ‘old words’ for the New World of colonial society. They ornamented the speeches with rhetorical techniques derived from Santa Cruz's Erasmian curriculum. They interpolated biblical sentences, particularly from Proverbs and Sirach, to enhance the evangelising potential of the discourses. Finally, they drew on Erasmus's theory of speech, as expressed in his pedagogical and spiritual writings, to explicate Nahuatl los difrasismos concerning eloquence and good counsel. Contextualising the Huehuetlahtolli [1601] in Santa Cruz's Erasmian schoolroom reveals the contours of its argument for vernacular evangelisation, the liberal education of indigenous youth and for the elegance of the Nahuatl tongue.

The emergence of Scottish separatism as a viable political force in the 1960s is often seen as a reflection of Britain's wider political fortunes in a post-imperial world. It is indeed the case that the Scottish National Party emerged from electoral obscurity to become a credible political alternative in the 1960s, culminating in Winifred Ewing's by-election victory in Hamilton in November 1967. That this occurred in the wake of Britain's retreat from empire fuelled speculation that separatist momentum in Scotland represented an inward manifestation of the same pressures that had torn the empire asunder. This paper draws on sources from local politics to make two key arguments: first, that post-imperial influences were neither as pervasive nor even particularly prominent in the local politics of devolution as may be assumed. Equally, however, global processes of decolonisation contributed to the separatist agenda in ways more subtle than has hitherto been acknowledged. Indeed, there are several striking similarities between the gathering political momentum of the SNP and the sweep of ‘new nationalisms’ through the remnants of the British world in the 1960s, particularly in the former British Dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Thus, the relative absence of decolonising discourse in the local electoral source material does not necessarily rule out these global undercurrents, although the exact nature of their influence needs to be more carefully evaluated.

The divergent views held by historians and sociologists as to what does and does not constitute nationalism will, I hope, provide me with some excuse for not attempting here a general definition of this phenomenon. Nor will I presume to adjudicate between the opinions of scholars like Hans Kohn who, confining their attention to Western Europe, will not hear of nationalism before the rise of modern states between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, and of historians like G. G. Coulton who, after surveying the policy of the Papacy, the life of the Universities, the internal frictions in the monasteries and the history of medieval warfare, concluded that nationalism, which had been developing in Western Europe since the eleventh century, became a basic factor in European politics by the fourteenth. My paper is concerned with the medieval history of Eastern Europe: an area which I propose to define, by combining a geographical with a cultural criterion, as the group of countries which lay within the political or cultural orbit of Byzantium. The subject is vast and complex, and I can do no more than select a few topics for discussion. These I would like to present as arguments in support of three theses.