The major argument of those who view the Statute of Proclamations as a tyrannical measure seems to be that the government planned to use it to replace Parliamentary legislation with legislation by decree. Unfortunately this supposition has not been tested by a study of the actual use of proclamations in the reign of Henry VIII. The continuation of a three-centuries-old controversy over the meaning and intent of this enigmatic statute indicates that further efforts to unravel the mystery by concentrating on the wording of the statute and the circumstances surrounding its passage would prove unrewarding unless new evidence were to be uncovered. This dilemma suggests that a new approach is necessary. If the Statute of Proclamations is to be understood in its proper context, the total role of proclamations in Tudor legislation and administration must be investigated, and their relationship to other types of legislation during the entire Tudor period must be studied.

In a whimsical scene of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the pope and the Cardinal of Lorraine enter the banquet hall only to have an invisible Faustus snatch away their dinners and, in a truly spectacular exit, scatter the banquet hall with fireworks.1 The Cardinal of Lorraine has been surrounded by fireworks for four hundred years. This is an effort to give him some peace at last.

The concern here is a symposium of quite another sort, the Colloquy of Poissy. Poissy, the last great Colloquy of the Reformation, was an attempt at religious reconciliation of Calvinist and Catholic within the framework of the Gallican Church.

In most accounts of the rural uprisings of 1857 the moneylender, whether described as ‘sleek mahajan’ or ‘impassive bania’, is cast as the villain of the piece. It is he who is seen as the principal beneficiary of the landed revolution that occurred in the first half-century of British rule in the North-Western Provinces and gave the non-agricultural classes of the towns a mounting share in the control of land. And his ascendancy is attributed directly to the institutional changes effected by British rule, among the most important of which were the transformation of the immediate revenuecollecting right {malguzari) into a transferable private property; the heavy, inelastic cash assessments; and above all, the forced sale of land rights for arrears of revenue or in satisfaction of debt. ‘The public sale of land’, says Professor Chaudhuri, ‘not merely uprooted the ordinary people from their smallholdings but also destroyed the gentry of the country, and both the orders being victims of British civil law were united in the revolutionary epoch of 1857–8 in a common effort to recover what they had lost.’.

In June 1890 Lord Salisbury negotiated an agreement with Germany ceding Heligoland in return for the renunciation of German claims to Uganda, the cession of the German protectorate over the East African coast north of Witu, and the recognition of a British protectorate over Zanzibar. Although France was a party to the Joint Declaration of 1862 which guaranteed the independence of Zanzibar, Salisbury did not consider himself bound to consult her about the proposed change in the island's status. More surprisingly, he offered no assurance that French rights in Zanzibar would continue to be respected. When the French protested, Salisbury apologized for this oversight and entered into negotiations with their ambassador, W. H. Waddington. On 5 August a new agreement was signed whereby France recognized the British protectorate over Zanzibar in exchange for the recognition of her own protectorate over Madagascar and of her sphere of influence ‘south of her Mediterranean Possessions, up to a line from Say on the Niger, to Barruwa on Lake Tchad, drawn in such a manner as to comprise in the sphere of action of the [Royal] Niger Company all that fairly belongs to the Kingdom of Sokoto’.

The storm over Fritz Fischer's study of German aims in the First World War seems to be abating at last. Even in Germany, where the process of readjustment has understandably been painful, few historians would now dispute Fischer's conclusions on the war aims themselves, though the secondary argument on Bethmann Hollweg's role in their formulation continues. More surprising still is the growing acceptance of Fischer's position on the origins of the war. If his opponents were at first concerned to deny that German policy was at the root of the July crisis, their present purpose is only to deny that an annexationist programme existed before the outbreak of war. If his opponents were at first concerned to deny that German policy was at the root of the July crisis, their present purpose is only to deny that an annexationist programme existed before the outbreak of war. Most German historians now accept either that Imperial Germany was taking a ‘calculated risk’ in supporting Austria over Serbia or that Germany was anxious to launch a ‘preventive’ attack on Russia and France before especially the former Power grew too strong.

The Munich agreement of 1938 continues to be a source of controversy, and differences concerning the reasons for British policy are unlikely to be resolved for some time to come.1 There is, however, one minor but important aspect of that policy which has been little discussed—the activities of Konrad Henlein. His supposed aims played an important part in British calculations in the years before Munich. It is the purpose of this article to take a fresh look at his visits to London. While contemporary impressions can now be compared with evidence drawn from a variety of sources, the full truth about Henlein remains elusive. Since certain crucial documents or records of conversations cannot now be traced, a certain amount of conjecture is inevitable and dogmatism about his rather enigmatic conduct would be unwise.