Hugh Balsham, bishop of Ely from 1257 to 1286, is chiefly remembered for his services to the university of Cambridge and for his foundation of Peterhouse. His election to the see of Ely, and the subsequent dispute arising out of it, has hitherto received but scanty attention, and the treatment that this incident was afforded has usually been based on the account given by Matthew Paris. But Matthew Paris's highly romantic and colourful account is not at all accurate, nor, from a canonist's point of view, does his report make intelligible reading; it is the somewhat sensational presentation of one who relied on the necessarily somewhat distorted tales of more or less well-informed reporters. Being apparently the only contemporary source, it has served so far as the sole record of this dispute. But newly discovered material enables us to reconstruct the dispute following the election and, above all, to show the real reasons which provoked it. Although by no means aspiring to the striking publicity of the Canterbury election some fifty years earlier, this incident, in several respects, is more important than its renowned predecessor. Before we attempt to reconstruct the arguments, it will be advisable to summarize briefly the report of Matthew Paris.

On 19 May 1692, the English and Dutch fleets decisively defeated the French fleet off Barfleur, and followed up their advantage the next day by destroying fifteen of its ships in the bay of La Hougue. Despite the comparatively small material losses, the battle marked, and was recognized as marking, the turning point in the war at sea. It removed in dramatic form the fear of invasion which had been present, and at times had seemed real, since the French had defeated the allies off Beachy Head in 1690, and offered in its place, and for the first time, the prospect of an offensive unhindered by a superior enemy fleet. The fruits of victory, however, soon turned sour, for its very completeness had set a problem which seemed insoluble. The logical sequence of Barfleur, as was recognized at the time, was a large-scale landing on the northern coast of France; but when this was tried in the summer of 1692 the attempt ended in a public fiasco, with the admirals arguing against the generals and the ministers arguing with both. The 14,000 troops who had been put aboard the transports had to be dispersed, and the only result of the campaign was to secure the dismissal of Admiral Edward Russell as commander-in-chief of the fleet and of his rival Nottingham as the Secretary of State in charge of naval affairs. At the end of the year the future success of large-scale combined operations seemed improbable; but with the French fleet unlikely to seek an encounter in 1693 there was no alternative employment for the English fleet.

If the year 1792 has come to be remembered for political crises which made it one of the turning-points in English history, it has been famous also for the auspiciousness of its commencement, the optimism and the promise that characterized its earliest months. In January and February Pitt repeatedly drew the attention of parliament to the increasing prosperity of the country and the flourishing state of the public revenue; and opposition did not pretend to deny this, but merely said that the prosperity ‘was no feather in the minister's cap’, since it was due to circumstances independent of government. Even that aggressive admirer of the French Revolution, Earl Stanhope, wrote to a Frenchman: ‘We are already free… and England is now the richest, the most prosperous and—climate apart—the happiest country in Europe.’ Even that determined reformer, the Rev. Christopher Wyvill, joined the crowd of witnesses to the country's good fortune, though he speculated that if a great European war should break out, ‘the English people would probably then renew, but in a louder tone’, the cry for parliamentary reform. Pitt attributed the prosperity to the rise of machinery, the credit facilities, the ‘exploring and enterprising spirit of our merchants’, and the mode in which money was continually being fed back into industry. He claimed that something was due, however, to the internal tranquillity of the nation and ‘the natural effects of a free but well regulated government’. The correspondence of the year 1792 often gives evidence of the sense of rising prosperity; and to this would be attributed on the one hand the general attachment to the constitution, and on the other hand the indifference of the nation to matters of foreign policy.

It is a traditional view among historians that nothing so be-devilled Anglo-American relations in their early days as the British wartime practice of impressing seamen. True, the British never asserted any right to impress persons who were not British subjects, but on the other hand such persons often claimed to be American citizens, and it was frequently very difficult to determine whether they really were so or not. Moreover, alleged British subjects were pursued by the Royal Navy on to neutral ships, not only in British ports and waters but also on the high seas, as well as on to British merchant ships and privateers, even when these were lying in neutral harbours. Finally, American naturalization papers were not respected by the British before 1870; until then the rule was, ‘once a British subject always a British subject’. The result was that, according to American official estimates, at least 2410 genuine Americans were impressed by the British between 1792 and 1802, and a further 6057 between 1802 and the beginning of 1812. The latter figure is probably an underestimate, and the grand total of impressed men for whom some colour of American citizenship existed may perhaps reach 10,000. Very many contemporary Americans believed it to be five or six times as much—with no shadow of doubt about the citizenship—but most American historians would now admit that such beliefs were ill-founded.