On the eve of the Henrician Reformation, the law of treason was markedly less well developed than one might suppose. Over a century of dynastic war, party violence, and the vigorous extermination of opponents had left strikingly little deposit in the law which was still essentially defined by the famous act of 1352, the first, and to this day the basic, treason statute. Minor attempts to vary the law may here be ignored, and the only serious alteration—the act of 1397 which omitted the demand for an ‘overt deed’—was repealed in 1399. The reasons for what might at first sight seem a surprising reluctance to extend the grasp of the treason law are not obscure. For one thing, most of the so-called traitors of the later fifteenth century were men who had had the misfortune to fight on the losing side in a civil war. Their treason grew out of the see-saw of politics and was committed in open war. They were therefore commonly amenable (if not already killed in battle) to the summary procedure of treason trials under the law of arms and did not come within the purview of the law of England at all. This method of dealing with the vanquished had one disadvantage: conviction by a constable's or marshal's court did not involve forfeiture of lands. The Crown therefore had recourse to the authority of the high court of parliament, and acts of attainder followed each turn of the wheel in the civil wars.

One of the most serious problems facing Archbishop Laud was the rapid growth of the Lecturer Movement during the 1620s and 1630s. The increasing numbers of graduates available, and the increasing amount of money donated to support them meant that the weekly lectures had become one of the chief “religious … organizations of the opposition”, and were beginning to “undermine the hierarchical principle”. The gravity of the situation was marked by the increasingly stringent regulation of the lecturers. They had originally been allowed to preach with very little control, but from the Canons of 1604 onwards they were made the subject of several new regulations. These culminated in the Directions of March 16296 which, although issued by Archbishop Abbot, were based upon suggestions made by Laud to the king. Soon afterwards the lecturers in London Diocese were curtailed as a prelude to Laud's future work as archbishop. The Directions were reissued in January 1634, and a policy of deliberately reducing certain kinds of lecturer was initiated in several dioceses, pursued in the Metropolitical Visitation, and completed by Laud's supporters amongst the bishops.

In recent years a good deal of attention has been paid to the fall of Robert Harley in 1708.1 The purpose of the present essay is to examine the other side of the coin—Harley's appointment in 1704. This latter problem is not simply a more neglected theme. It is also more important. In the main the various studies of the Secretary's resignation have concerned themselves with the immediate occasion of his fall. The roots of the trouble—the longstanding difference between Harley and the Churchill group over Junto pressure—have not been in question. Harley's admission to Cabinet rank on the other hand poses problems on a grander scale. The reputation of key political figures is involved. So too is the entire profile of ministerial history in the first half-dozen years of Queen Anne's reign. Indeed one might even suggest that Harley's appointment has more than a little to tell us about that hoariest of problems, the Whig Interpretation of History.

Historians of the ‘Age of Reform’ have sometimes been tempted into the fallacy castigated long ago by Herbert Butterfield; they busy themselves ‘with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress’ and forget ‘with what wilfulness and waste [progress] twists and turns”. Often, by implication, they exaggerate the stupidity and selfishness of the reactionaries while overestimating the enlightenment of the reformers and understressing their faddishness, their lack of scruple, and their divided aims or methods; it thus becomes difficult to see why reforming causes were ever resisted. In this sense, nineteenth-century England has received too few ‘Tory historians’ not too many; though with Professor Gash's well-known defence of Tories misguided enough to oppose franchise reform in 1831–2, and with the recent reinstatement of mid-Victorian working men shortsighted enough to vote Liberal there are signs that the reaction against Whiggish historiography of the nineteenth century has already begun.

It has become a tradition to portray Transvaal history as a struggle between Boer nationalism and international capitalism, from the beginnings of large-scale gold mining in the 1880s until the electoral victory of General Botha and Het Volk in 1907. J. A. Hobson, writing in 1899–1900, predicted that after—as before—the South African War, the Imperial Government would have to face the dilemma of choosing between ‘an oligarchy of financial Jews, and the restoration of Boer domination’, since there was no other basis of political power. In his analysis of Transvaal white politics, he admitted that some gold-mining companies (the J. B. Robinson group, Barnato's and sometimes the companies of Albu and Goertz) were hostile to the influence of larger companies (Eckstein's and Consolidated Gold Fields), but denied that this affected the monolithic nature of international capitalism in the Transvaal. Later writers on the period, who have rejected almost everything that Hobson wrote, have nevertheless endorsed his interpretation. The Boer leaders were understandably happy to approve of such an analysis, since it placed them in a flattering light as the only realistic salvation for a magnate-dominated society. General Botha, for example, ardently courted the white working men on the Rand after the War, stressing the identity of material interests between farmers and artisans, in the face of the capitalist threat. General Smuts presented a more subtle and persuasive version of the argument, when attempting to persuade the Colonial Office to grant responsible government to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony.

Before 1914 one of the methods often suggested as a solution of the Home Rule problem and the more general one of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom was ‘Home Rule all round’, known also as ‘Devolution’ or ‘Federalism’ dependent on the occasion or the party affiliation of the would-be reformer. The concept was by no means a new one; it had been broached as early as the 1830s and had received much attention in the eighties and nineties at the time of Gladstone's two Home Rule bills. At best it meant the erection of four provincial Parliaments with separate executives for Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, responsible for essentially local matters, and an overall Parliament sitting in London, elected on a population basis, responsible for general United Kingdom affairs such as postal services, customs, trade, defence and foreign policy; at the very least the scheme meant the devolution onto local government bodies, possibly provincial councils, of many of the more parochial problems considered at Westminster. ‘Home Rule all round’ attracted considerable interest in 1910 at the time of the Constitutional Conference and again during the tempestuous months of 1913–14 when the United Kingdom hovered on the brink of civil war and any and all compromise solutions were of necessity being explored. The role played by the Round Table Movement in these proposals and subsequent manoeuvres has only partially been recognized.

When, on 16 October 1925, the leading European statesmen initialled the famous Locarno agreements, a new era of international tranquillity and peace appeared to have dawned. The British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, carried away by euphoria, wrote of ‘feeling like a little child again in spirit’ and of having ‘lived such days and celebrated such a birthday as it is given to no man to experience twice’. In reality, however, the agreements were built on inadequate foundations. As Viscount Cecil of Chelwood foresaw, limited regional security guarantees were an unsatisfactory substitute for the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance (1923) and the Geneva Protocol (1924), whose rejection by successive British Governments had spelt the end of hopes that wider collective security provisions and measures of disarmament might be achieved simultaneously. The Locarno agreements were only finally torn up in March 1936 when Adolf Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland; but the spirit which underlay them began to evaporate from the day of their signature. In this essay attention is given only to the first post-Locarno crisis, which was in itself sufficient to disillusion many optimists and to reveal that Franco-German tension was still a potent force in European relations. This crisis arose out of Germany's decision, in part fulfilment of her obligations under the agreements, to apply for membership of the League of Nations.