On Saturday, 4 December 1154, eight hundred years ago, Nicholas Breakspear was elected pope. On the following day he was enthroned and crowned at St Peter's, Rome. Adrian IV was the only ‘pontifex natione Anglicus’ who has assumed the tiara.

One of the arguments reported by Clarendon against the imposition of the English liturgy on the Scots ran as follows: ‘The kingdom of Scotland generally had long been jealous, that, by the king's continued absence from them, they should by degrees be reduced to be but as a province of England, and subject to their laws and government, which they could never submit to….’ Behind those words ‘the king's continued absence’ there lies concealed a series of ideas and assumptions which were so obvious in the seventeenth century that there was no need to elaborate or dwell upon them. For this very reason, it is possible that they have been overlooked in later periods, when conceptions of government and society had greatly altered. Yet phrases like ‘the king's presence’ had such vivid connotations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that to neglect them is to neglect important clues to the understanding of the social and political conduct of the men of the time.

A Study of the historiography of the Revolution of 1688—the Revolution considered not only as an event in space and time but also in the minds of men—is long overdue. Although such a study would far transgress the decent limits of this paper, it is possible to isolate here a single phenomenon in the historiography of 1688; to examine the posthumous reputation of one of the central figures in that Revolution, to uncover the sources from which it rose, and assess the validity of the evidence upon which it is based.

In 1854 Russia for the first time was confronted with that doubtful privilege of national greatness, a single-handed war with a coalition of major European powers. When Nicholas I, ignoring the prudent advice of Nesselrode, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, had ordered his troops to occupy once again the Danubian Principalities, Turkey had resisted, England and France after some hesitation had come to her assistance, and Austria had been converted from a close ally into an unfriendly neutral.

Chinese Tartary or Turkestan, or what has been since 1884 the ‘New Province’ of Sinkiang, is an irregular thousand-mile long tract in the heart of Asia, shut in on three sides by mountains and on the east by vast deserts. That it should still be in China's possession today, after a century in which so many of her outlying dependencies were shorn away, is one of the facts of modern history that it would have been most rash to predict.