The Cinque Port tradition which inspires the civic pride of the Portsmen of this day has been built upon their former naval importance. We are accustomed to think of this group of towns, Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich, ringing the south-eastern coast of England, as sentinels of the channel, “the Gates,” as they liked to describe themselves, “that open and shutt to the perill or safety of this Kingdome.”

The reigns of the last two Stuart kings are coloured by the fact that Charles II did not inherit his throne but was restored to it. During the first seven years of the Restoration era a second attempt to overthrow the monarchy naturally seemed possible to Royalists, whose memories of the discomforts of exile were still green. Hence a special organization to watch the movements of malcontents and report on their activities, developed under the control of the Secretaries of State. Contemporary State Papers offer abundant evidence to prove that much of the time of Nicholas and his successors was consumed in dealing with information, poured in by spies stationed in almost every English county, and in those parts of Europe and the New World where regicides and others had taken refuge.

Even in his lifetime Henry Beaufort was a controversial figure. The Londoners envied his wealth and detested his policies; Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, denounced him as an ambitious schemer and a traitor; both pope and king punished him for his disobedience. Yet more than once he was extolled in parliament for his generosity, loyalty, patriotism and wisdom in affairs of state. These official encomiums preserved his reputation for a generation after his death. Upon them Stubbs built his pic ture of the cardinal as the defender of the Lancastrian constitu tion, the maintainer of Henry V's conquests and the wise seeker after a timely peace. ‘Far sighted and patriotic in his counsels’, he became ‘the mainstay of his house’, ‘ready to sacrifice his wealth and labour to the king’. It was scarcely Beaufort's fault that, at his death, the tokens of Lancaster's fall were already apparent. A different, less favourable, view originated with Edward Hall and was popularized by Shakespeare. In the scheme of retributive justice with which the new historiography clothed the Wars of the Roses, the cardinal and his family appeared as the principal fomenters of dissension. Hall's own detestation of Wolsey added a touch of venom to his strictures on the pride and avarice of Wolsey's predecessor.

In making some researches into the migrations of the Norsemen in early times, I have been much struck with the apparent absence in the ordinary sources of information of anything which could resuscitate for us a picture of the condition of things in North Britain at the beginning of the ninth century, when the isles and coasts of Scotland were so terribly harried by the pirates. Recently the profound researches of Dr. Reeves and Mr. Skene, both of them worthy to rank among the greatest names in our historic literature, have accumulated a great mass of material, from which, and from other sources, it is possible to clothe with interest the somewhat dry bones of the early annalists, and I have thought that a careful survey of this seldom trodden field would be acceptable to the Fellows of the Royal Historical Society, and if they deem it worthy I hope to give in a second paper a similar picture of the Irish religious foundations, whose wealth and insecurity were the chief temptations to the rovers and buccaneers of the ninth century. In this paper I have gathered to a focus the information I have been able to meet with about the condition and surroundings of the Columban clergy, and described the doings of the pirates from the year 793, which I believe was the first occasion when they molested our shores, to the year 806, when “the family” or brotherhood of Iona, the mother monastery of the order, was burnt, and its inmates massacred and scattered.

Was the Council of Constance a failure? We are apt to think so. True it deposed three popes, and burnt two heresiarchs and mildly condemned some unusually idiotic pamphleteering. It did restore unity to the Church desolated by half a century of schism. But it seemed as though the passion for unity had absorbed all the energies of men who had before talked not merely of unity, but of reformation—both in the head and members of the Church. For enduring reform men had to wait a full century, and when it came it came in other and rougher guides than that contemplated by Parisian doctors. But this was as nothing to the ruin that befel the constitutional schemes of the fathers. They were fond of asserting the superiority of councils to popes. They desired to take security for the future by clipping the wings of the Canonists, and (shall we say?) interpreting the ‘plenitudo potestatis.’ The Pope was still to be head, for Jesus Christ had founded a kingdom; but he was to rule with a Bill of Rights to restrain him to do what he ought, not what he liked. The decree ‘Frequens’ was to serve as a triennial act for the ecclesiastical revolution, and a council which was virtually the Church—at any rate as much so as the eighteenth century House of Commons was in Whig phrase ‘virtually’ the representative of the people of England—was to meet at short intervals to effect reforms and to teach the Pope his place.

As in relation to many other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to apply modern conceptions of nationhood to the situation in the Low Countries. If the difficulty seems more awkward in this area than elsewhere, it is perhaps merely because the sixteenth-century Netherlands, as we all know, developed into two distinct nations, the northern Netherlands and Belgium. It is clearly impossible to give a convincing answer to the question whether, in politically more propitious circumstances, the northern and the southern Netherlands might have grown into a single nation state with one common culture. All we know is that in the north a new state was created which, in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly possessed a culture idiosyncratic enough to be described as properly Dutch. We may well call this a national culture. On the other hand, if we bear in mind, asmany seventeenth-century commentators did, that the Dutch Republic was no more than a part of what had been the real Netherlands, both north and south, it would not be totally incongruous to define Dutch culture, that is the northern culture, as regional rather than national. However, if we do so, we must conclude that the national culture uniting the southern and the northern Netherlands, and somehow enclosing the regional cultures of Flanders and Brabant, of Holland and Zeeland, never came into existence.

A few years ago I commented in an article on the European catastrophe of 1870, viewed in the long perspective of relations between the French and the Germans down to that date. My present lecture embodies a comment on the international consequences of 1870 during the twenty years which followed it. I hope in time to come to pursue the theme of Franco-German relations further down the slope of time, as far as the end of the Second World War.

I feel somewhat diffident in venturing to read a paper on the subject of the work of the great historian, on whose writings the President of the Royal Historical Society is the leading modern authority. His new edition of Macaulay's ‘History’ is a work that has been welcomed by all historical students, and the wealth of the illustrations corresponds with the richness of the style of which the historian was a past master. No one can study the ‘History’ without experiencing the pleasure of reading the graceful, flowing, well-balanced sentences, the pure English, the rhythm of each phrase, and of noting the graphic power of description and characterisation. It may be that the more exact historians of our own day, whose facts are supported by numerous references to authorities and documents, who never give the rein to their imaginations, take too little trouble to clothe their bare statements with suitable adornment, and cultivate a bald, tedious and cumbersome style depressing to the reader, might learn a lesson from the elder school of which Lord Macaulay was so bright an example.

Several centuries before the introduction of surnames, and its adoption as a family designation, the name of Roger was common over Europe. It is still to be found, both as a Christian and a family name, in most of the continental countries. In France it is spelt Roger; in German Roger and Rüdiger; in Norway Hrodgjer and Ruadgjer; in Spain Rogerio; and in Italy Rogero and Ruggiero. According to Miss Yonge the name signifies “spear of fame” it had been originally granted in meed of renown—in reward of heroism. The name became pre-eminently Norman.

The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 had international repercussions, as nuclear fallout, and accompanying fear, traversed well beyond the borders of the Soviet Union. In Britain, raised radioactivity levels caused some upland regions, such as north-west Wales, to become subject to restrictions on the sale of livestock, which created upheaval for the agricultural community, leading to an uncharacteristic outburst of protest from farmers who were unhappy with the government's response to the crisis. Concurrently, nuclear sceptics in Wales attempted to politicise the tragedy in the Ukraine to underline the dangers of nuclear power, dovetailing the accident with the looming perils of Wales's domestic nuclear industry. In exploring these issues, this paper contributes to a growing body of work on ‘British nuclear cultures’, moving away from its generally urban focus by examining a Welsh rural case study. This approach also circumvents the well-trodden historiographical narrative surrounding the politics of nuclear warfare by highlighting debates arising from civil nuclear power. Crucially, the work demonstrates how looking at the modern Welsh past through the prism of a transnational nuclear event such as the Chernobyl catastrophe shows that the history of twentieth-century Wales is enriched by moving beyond the stereotypically ‘Welsh’ industrial shibboleths of the south Wales coalfield and the slate mines of north Wales.

In drawing your attention to an intrigue to deprive the Earl of Essex of the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland it may perhaps be worth while to say a few words about the dignity and emoluments of that office. At the period of which we are treating, the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland was regarded without question as the most exalted position which an English subject could obtain out of England. In England itself there was only one post, the Lord Treasurership, which surpassed it, and it may be questioned whether the sword of the Lord Lieutenant did not confer more power than the staff of the Lord Treasurer. The Lord Lieutenant directly represented the Crown in a land which, for centuries, no English monarch had visited. He had his Court, his guards; he was head of all the military force in the country. Lord Halifax, on one occasion, expressed disinclination for the post, because ‘he did not love,’ he said, ‘a new scene, nor to dine with a sound of trumpet and 36 dishes of meat on his table.’

The Cottonian map, or ‘plat,’ Aug. I. i. 18, which forms the subject of this note, represents a descent on Brighton by a flotilla of French galleys, whose attack was covered by a squadron of men-of-war, represented as under sail or lying off the town.

Gladstone came to office for his second ministry in May 1880, after fight marked by bitter strife and uncompromising temper on both sides. The Times considered it the hottest political struggle ever known in this country. The Liberal Government with their large majority came into office in a mood of concentration on domestic legislation and the belief that external affairs had hitherto received too much attention. The Conservatives for their part claimed that, if a minority, they were compact and inspirited. The Opposition, although weak, would be resolute.

The High or Principal Court of the Admiralty of England was erected probably about the beginning of the fifteenth century, and for half a century before this courts were held by the Admirals of the North, South, and West within their respective districts. But the business of these early Admiralty Courts was trifling, and they have left scarcely any records. There are upon the Patent Rolls and elsewhere a few meagre references to their proceedings, but these are of little interest, and need not delay us to-night. It was Henry VIII. who first raised the Court to something like the importance of the King's Courts at Westminster, and its records may be said to begin with his reign. But for many years they are scanty in bulk, and it is not until about the year 1550 that they begin to be of any general interest. From this date onwards they are very voluminous; and in order to give a general idea of their character as a whole it will be necessary for me to-night to deal with those of a limited period only. I select those which belong to the latter half of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century, because they are the earliest, and also because, this being the period of the Court's greatest activity, they are the most interesting. The history of England is to a great extent the history of her ships and seamen, and this is notably the case during the century with which I propose to deal.

But little is yet known of the vast mass of documents bearing upon nineteenth-century history which are to be found in the archives of Europe; and historians have been tempted to take refuge in the thought that, after all, these papers contain little that is really of great value. How far that is true for any period of the nineteenth century may, I think, be doubted; but for the period during which Castlereagh held office, it can, surely, be urged that the unpublished documents in the Record Office are of real importance. Singularly, little attention has been paid by English historians to this period of history, and but little use has as yet been made of unpublished material. It is true that the collections of papers in the Londonderry correspondence and the Wellington Supplementary Dispatches contain a vast amount of information; but, valuable as this is, it is only a small fragment of the whole, and much of it can only be interpreted by the aid of other evidence. What has already been done in this way has thrown much new light on the character and achievements of Castlereagh. Fyffe was able to appreciate his career and his connexion with the congress system with much more justice, because he had seen some of the documents of the years 1814–15; and Mr. Alison Phillipps' monographs in the ‘Cambridge Modern History’ have already destroyed many of the fictions which had masqueraded as facts during the century. But as yet no detailed study of this period, based upon the archives, has appeared. Castlereagh's career has attracted but little attention and sympathy. There is no detailed account in English of the congress of Vienna, still less of the later congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle, Troppau, and Laibach. Yet, even if it be not admitted that Castlereagh was himself a great statesman, the circumstances of his life make the policy of England during his period of office well worthy of particular attention. From 1814 to 1822 England was connected with the Continent by ties far stronger than any which have bound her before or since. Not merely was she bound by treaties of exceptional character, but her leading statesman had exceptional personal relations with those of the other powers during a period which has never been surpassed in the invention of new methods of diplomacy, and the solution of difficult problems of immense importance. In these questions Castlereagh took a leading, at times a dominant, part. He was the creator of the great treaty which made it certain that Napoleon would no longer rule over France; he was the decisive factor at the Congress of Vienna, for it was he alone who made England take so commanding a position in the critical questions of Poland and Saxony; and he had perhaps a greater share than any other statesman in securing that period of comparative peace for Europe which was the first necessity of its future progress.

THE influence of Churchill’s account of the appeasement years on the public mind has long been recognised and has been rehearsed here by David Reynolds. Equally influential in moulding the present view of the past has been the account of the Anglo-American alliance given by Churchill inThe Second World War. One healthy change that the twenty-first century might bring is a less romanticised and more realistic account of the so-called special relationship. Like all good revisionism, this essay will attempt to clear away some of the rich Churchillian detritus, before trying to trace some of the outline of a different version of events. Such, however, is the artistry of the Churchillian version, and so strong the need of the British to believe it, that only the boldest of seers would wager on the chances of it being dislodged in the near future.

This article offers a framework for historical analysis of the goals of Protestant missionary projects. ‘Conversion’ in Protestantism is not clearly defined, is liable to be falsified and may (in some missionary views) require preparatory work of various kinds before it can be attempted. For these reasons, Protestant missionaries have adopted a variety of intermediate and proxy goals for their work, goals which it is argued can be organised onto four axes: orthodoxy, zeal, civilisation and morality. Together these form a matrix which missionaries, their would-be converts and their sponsors have tried to negotiate. In different historical contexts, missionaries have chosen different combinations of priorities, and have adapted these in the face of experience. The article suggests how various historical missionary projects can be analysed using this matrix and concludes by suggesting some problems and issues in the history of Protestant missions which such analysis can illuminate.